


The Seas Incarnadine

by Gray_Days



Series: The Pirates of Pandaemonium [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 19th Century, Age of Sail, Canon-Typical Disregard For The Gender Binary, Comrade Crowley, Crowley is Good at Being a Demon (Good Omens), Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Flogging, Gang Rape, Hurt Crowley (Good Omens), It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Other, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Period-Typical Transphobia, Pirate Crowley (Good Omens), Pirates, Regency Era, The Royal Navy, The Screwtape Letters - C. S. Lewis, Trans Character(s) Written By Trans Author, Whump with plot, canon-typical philosophy, come for the torture porn; stay for the postcolonialist deconstruction of morality, period-typical misogyny
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:53:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 29,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24867133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gray_Days/pseuds/Gray_Days
Summary: This whole piracy lark had, Crowley reflected as he was hauled to his feet in front of the bloodied and shell-shocked remnants of his crew, gone a bit further than he'd originally intended.
Relationships: Crowley (Good Omens)/Other(s)
Series: The Pirates of Pandaemonium [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1799521
Comments: 64
Kudos: 91
Collections: Good Omens Kink Meme





	1. Kings Upon the Main

**Author's Note:**

> I would love to be working on my other WIPs, but until I can get properly medicated I apparently have the energy to think about a maximum of one (1) thing, and right now that's Good Omens. I am resigned to this fact.
> 
> **Additional content warnings are listed in order of initial appearance in the endnotes.** If for any reason you wish to avoid it, the bulk of the more extreme content is contained within Chapter 2 and can be safely skipped without losing the thread of the plot.
> 
> Whilst _The Screwtape Letters_ is not _explicitly_ invoked herein, the influence of C. S. Lewis's theological opus upon the authors of Good Omens, and upon the content of this fic in particular, is sufficiently palpable that the serial numbers cannot so much be said to have been filed off as to merely be facing away from the viewer, slightly offscreen. Accordingly, I've included it as a searchable tag under the assumption that any Screwtape Letters fans with a taste for dead dove might find this fic relevant to their interests.
> 
> I am deeply indebted to [Langerhan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Langerhan), [Kieron_ODuibhir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir), [anafabula](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula), [PreposterousGreen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonswing/pseuds/PreposterousGreen), and [Meridians_of_Madness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meridians_of_Madness), among many others, for their assistance with research and historical nitpicking. Any anachronisms that remain are a byproduct of Good Omens existing in a slightly alternate timeline where the Bastille still stood in 1793, knights wore 14th-century plate armour in sixth-century Britain, and the phrase "lead balloon" was invented before balloons themselves, and are employed similarly as translation conventions for modern readers.
> 
> You can reblog this fic on Tumblr [here](https://metatextuality.tumblr.com/post/621858390804660224/the-seas-incarnadine-graydays).

_“I mean, when you think about it, we've got them into enough trouble as it is. You and me. Over the years. What with one thing and another."_

_"We were only doing our jobs," muttered Crowley._

_"Yes," said Aziraphale. "So what? Lots of people in history have only done their jobs, and look at the trouble **they** caused.”_

* * *

This whole piracy lark had, in retrospect, gone a bit further than intended.

It wasn't Crowley's usual scene. The entertainment was lousy, for one, and there was far too much hard work and far too few restaurants for it to really feel worth the time spent. Not to mention that as much as he enjoyed humanity, _people_ were something else altogether. Being shoved into tight quarters with dozens of unwashed mammals for long periods of time, without giving into the urge to set off a powder keg of interpersonal drama that ended with half the ship dead, had been hard enough when it was just Noah and his immediate family.[1]

But Aziraphale received a missive commanding him to transfer to the Royal Navy at once for reasons he didn't seem much clearer on than Crowley did, other than that it had something to do with anarchic elements in the Caribbean, and it didn't seem quite sporting to go on wiling unopposed on their home turf. So Crowley had thought _what the hell, I could use a vacation,_ found a sufficiently sleek and dangerous-looking frigate with a sufficiently iron-fisted captain, signed on as navigator, and within a fortnight convinced the crew that mutiny and subsequent brigandage were simply in their best interests as free citizens.

The promotion had been rather an accident, in fact. It turned out that when the first mate was as reviled as his captain and everyone else on the ship considered you a sympathetic ear with some quite exciting ideas for the future, there was a natural inclination to turn to you for leadership. It helped that ever since the mutiny the _Apophis_ (as she was now called) had not once encountered still winds or rough seas, nor had its provisions ever been infested or its water stores dropped below halfway. And they hadn't needed to hire a new navigator. Captain James Antony, everyone soon learned, could distinguish exact longitude and latitude from a single glance at the sky, and always seemed to sense with uncanny precision where lay the choicest pickings on land or sea. They'd picked up quite a few crew members that way, some from surrendered slave ships, and quickly gained a disproportionately fearsome reputation from intransigent prisoners who'd been offered a dinghy and two days' provisions as an alternative to simply being dropped off the side of the ship into open water.[2]

Pirates were very much his kind of people, Crowley found. The margins of society tended to attract them: the subalterns, the rebels, people who didn't fit in where they were supposed to or had too much imagination or sheer irrepressible piss-and-vinegar to stay within the bounds of society without going mad. The entertainment was much better these days. Crowley's encyclopedic repertoire of Shakespearian comedies and dirty stories made him very popular.

All this went through his mind at about the same moment a foot-long wooden spar went through his thigh.

The pain hit before the realisation, a lightning-strike of agony from spine to skull that whited out his vision and left his ears ringing as if they were filled with water. Crowley forced his eyes open and gasped for air, a thin noise bursting out from between his teeth as the motion jostled something and he felt wood scrape against bone.

There was blood on the deck in front of him. A brown hand, not attached to anything. He could just barely make out the dots of Ursa Major tattooed into the skin. Lupita, who'd snuck aboard at Santo Domingo one night. She'd escaped the colonial sugar plantations, made her way as an able sailor and fearless gunner, singeing her fingertips on gunpowder and forfeiting her hearing with reckless abandon. The rest of her—

Wasn't, really. The cannon she'd been manning sat askew amid a diagonal trench of splintered wood that ended somewhere behind him. Lucky the gunpowder stores hadn't ignited in the process.

He'd lost his glasses. That wasn't important right now, but in the strange floating vertigo of shock, that was what Crowley's mind focused on: a cracked black lens lying just at the edge of his peripheral vision, and the unaccustomed brightness of the setting sun streaming past him.

Right. First things first.

There was pain peppered all along his side, but that was superficial, easy to imagine away. The massive piece of shrapnel in his leg, however, refused to be ignored. That was the problem with bodies — all those millions of nerves clamouring to be heard, to alert the user that there was something very wrong that needed to be attended to _now._ That something was wrong was obvious. He could feel wetness suffusing the fabric of his breeches and pooling beneath his knee, too-hot against the sudden chill of his skin. Crowley tried to grope blindly for the spar so he could pull it out and froze convulsively until he could stop screaming.

It wasn't pinning him to the deck, at least. He could tell by the way the point scraped along the boards under him with every tiny movement, juddering up his femoral nerve.

There was quite a lot of screaming.

Crowley clenched his teeth. Low-hanging fruit, he'd thought. A sixteen-gun merchantman just over a day's distance from shore, too far to send up the flag for reinforcements. It would have worked, if not for the British gunship that had pulled exactly the same nasty trick, appearing out of the setting sun beneath the dissipating shadows of a terrific spring storm to sandwich the _Apophis_ between them and take the pirates by surprise.

He tried shakily to force himself up, and made it almost six inches before his arms simply collapsed underneath him. Crowley pressed his cheek against the weathered boards and breathed, again and again, swallowing down the waves of nausea that seemed to rise with each incessant beat of his heart. The ship shuddered with the impact of another broadside and he whimpered.

In the lingering echo of the cannonade, a different type of impact became audible — grapnels thudding against the ship's rails, digging into the wood and pulling taut to draw it in closer to its assailant. That couldn't be right, could it? How long did it take for a ship to make a pass and come around again — at least a few minutes, surely? How long had Crowley just blacked out?

With a monumental effort Crowley rolled onto his back and fumbled for his pistol, choking off a breathless whine at the way it jarred his leg. No point in drawing his sword in this state — and anyway, unlike his opponents, _he_ wasn't limited to only one or two shots.

The fighting was much closer now. That screaming off to his left had to be Ayo, blending Yoruba and Igbo and English in an undifferentiated flood of calumnies until her voice broke under the force of the deluge. That thud of a body against the deck would be Williamson, just turned seventeen and unable to decide whether he was more infatuated with the thrill of the high seas or his captain. Crowley felt bad about that one, to be honest. It had felt a bit selfish to take advantage of the boy's hero-worship, but he'd been so heartbreakingly eager to take on any task Crowley could give him in exchange for a modicum of positive attention that he hadn't had it in him to turn the lad away.

Williamson's killer stepped over the boy's body and into Crowley's visual field, and instantly recoiled. "Mother of God!"

"Jensen, swear like that one more time under my command and I'll — Jesus fucking Christ!" His master took a stumbling step back along the blood-slick deck, crossing himself with his free hand. Crowley's grimace widened into something superficially like a grin. "The demon Antony," he breathed, gaze locked on Crowley's unmistakably serpentine eyes. "The tales hardly do you justice."

"I'm afraid," panted Crowley, "that you have me at a disadvantage, Captain." Despite supporting the gun with both hands, he was beginning to shake so badly that he feared he might drop it.

"Roger Harwood Lobcock, of the British Royal Navy," said Captain Roger Harwood Lobcock of the British Royal Navy. "Surrender peacefully, Captain Antony, and the rest of your crew will be taken into custody alive."

"So they can be tried and hung civilised-like, you mean?" grinned Crowley as Ayo's stream of invective cut off with a cry of pain and the sound of a sword clattering to the deck. "Tell me, Lobcock — you get a lot of jokes about your name, or do your men keep it behind your back, as it were?"

Crowley felt the metaphorical thunderhead boil in from the horizon an instant before the captain's expression followed and he kicked the gun out of Crowley's hands. "Ow," remarked Crowley, just in time for Lobcock's shiny Hessian boot to land heavily on his throat.

"All right," wheezed Crowley, "the name's off-limits, I get that, very legitimate, won't do it ag—" Lobcock leaned more weight onto Crowley's throat, cutting off any further attempts at repartee.

Bloody hell, but that _hurt._ Crowley might not need to breathe, but getting his throat crushed wasn't exactly his idea of fun, either.

He wondered dizzily if he could manifest a dagger, just to remind this poncy bastard what happened to the type of fool who tried to step on snakes. Godly man like that ought to know his Genesis better. His consciousness was skittering like sparks along his raw nerves, though, and he didn't think he could move without risking blacking out again. Probably telegraph his intent far too obviously to accomplish anything other than getting kicked some more, anyway.

"Crew of the _Apophis!"_ bellowed Lobcock with the stentorian lung capacity only attained through years of shouting orders in the most adverse conditions the ocean could provide. The tip of his sword hovered directly over Crowley's human heart. "Stand down if you value your captain's life!"

The command took several seconds to filter through the chaos on the ship. Ayo was the first to respond, clutching the bleeding wound in her shoulder. "You dogshit bastard! Ògún motherfucking ló máa pa ẹ́—"

"And gag the negro bitch if you need to," added Lobcock to the man standing over her, bloodied sword held to her neck.

Crowley closed his eyes. _Good old Ayo,_ he thought bitterly. Hell was going to love her.

The rest of the crew seemed to share her sentiments as they were herded amidships, though none expressed it quite so eloquently. "Fetch Hughes," Lobcock told Jensen, "and some rope. These godless reprobates have had justice a long time in coming."

Lobcock finally took some of his weight off Crowley's throat, though he kept him pinned under heel and sword. Crowley gasped in relief and considered coughing for verisimilitude, but even the thought of moving that much made his whole body flinch in anticipatory reflex, so he decided against it. Instead he rasped, "Proud of yourself, are you? The brave Captain Lobcock, taking down the demon pirate Antony with nothing but a sixth-rate cruiser and a stray bit of shrapnel. Probably get yourself a med—" He stopped talking as the point of the captain's sword slashed a shallow line up his chin and came to rest between his teeth, pressing against his tongue. "Ng sscenh a huunh, go' ih."

Crowley managed to keep still and mostly silent as the British naval surgeon made his rounds, stitching up and cauterising the worst of the wounds with the closely-supervised assistance of Asif, the _Apophis'_ s own medic, whose imperturbable steadiness of both hand and temperament had been far better appreciated among the pirate crew than the ship's original officers. Crowley shut his ears against the various weeping, swearing, screams, and so forth, and instead tried to concentrate on solving his own predicament. The pain radiating from his thigh to his extremities was alarmingly grounding, dragging him inexorably back into the delineated bounds of his current physical vessel despite all attempts to slip out of or transform it. Crowley was going to have to have a word with the Supply & Logistics division next time he went Down. This was ridiculous.

_O that this too, too solid flesh would melt,_ a stray synapse recalled unhelpfully.

Hughes came to Crowley last, after Asif had been dragged away to be bound with the rest of the _Apophis'_ s crew. He was a stocky, squarish fellow who looked down at Crowley with the stony antipathy of a military man weighing his reverence toward the Hippocratic oath. He turned to one of the men beside him. "I'm going to need the brazier, and at least two men to hold him down."

Crowley groaned. This was going to _suck._

Another pair of interchangeable uniforms settled their weight on Crowley's shoulders and calves with little care and some satisfaction for the pained noise this provoked, allowing Captain Lobcock to withdraw his sword and step back. Crowley squeezed his eyes shut and drew in a series of hitching breaths, doing his best to brace himself and knowing it wouldn't be enough.

He was proved right when a tourniquet tightened around his upper thigh, sending a searing bolt of sensation through to the ends of his toes. He was sobbing convulsively when his senses returned, muscles twitching in futile resistance as the surgeon cut away the blood-soaked fabric of his breeches around the impaled spar. "Please, please, _fuck,"_ he heard himself babbling, in several languages at once, and then Hughes braced one hand hard against his thigh and tore the spar out and Crowley _shrieked._

He whited out again when the hot iron was applied to cauterise the wound, and came to writhing and struggling fit to throw off the two men holding him down until the captain called over another several to keep him in place while Hughes packed the hole with bandages. There were broken, inhuman sounds coming from somewhere Crowley recognised as himself, because he could feel them vibrating in his throat and chest while his fingernails gouged slivers out of the deck. By the time the Navy men got off him and someone grabbed hold of his arms to tie his wrists together, Crowley had gone too limp to resist.

"Throw a line over the yardarm," Lobcock's voice filtered distantly through the semiconscious haze. "We'll hoist him up by the mainmast."

Wait, were they seriously going to hang him now? What had been the point of treating his leg, then? Just a light spot of torture for morale? Bit of a show for the lads? Usually Crowley quite enjoyed getting hanged — it was always funny to stop his heart and dangle there until his attempted murderers were sure he was dead, then scare the cacky out of them when he revealed otherwise — but he wasn't sure he had enough command over his body right now not to simply die like any other human, not to mention that he'd already, he felt, been choked enough for one day. Though (he brightened somewhat) that _would_ neatly resolve his present difficulty. He wondered which of the King's-jacks to possess. Lobcock would be ideal for a touch of poetic justice. He'd wager his life (hah!) that all that ostentatious piousness was little enough like the real thing to pose him no trouble at all.

He realised his misapprehension when he felt himself dragged up off the deck by his bound wrists until he was standing, barely, in front of the huddled remnants of his crew, twisting awkwardly as he tried to get his one good leg under him without jostling the other too much. It wasn't going well. He blinked and shook his head muzzily to clear some stray strands of hair out of his eyes as the captain came around in front of him.

"Calhoun," ordered Lobcock, "strip him."

What this amounted to in practice, apparently, was removing his sword belt, holster, and other personal accoutrements before slitting his coat and shirt up the back so that they hung around him in shreds. Crowley winced, not at the theft of his effects or the destruction of his conjured-up clothing, but because it occurred to him in the wavering twilight of his mind that without his usual ability to compartmentalise the more metaphysical aspects of his existence as they intersected with the material, he might not be able to maintain his preferred level of control over the appearance of his corporeal form. He hoped he wasn't manifesting scales, or something. This whole ordeal was already mortifying enough.

"Christ in Heaven," said someone behind him, fervently enough to forget their captain's priggish attitude regarding blasphemy. "What _is_ he?"

Great.

"Apophis, the serpent of darkness," called Asif, not typically a superstitious man, but now grinning vindictively. "You think that just because we're pirates, we'd invoke a god in vain, Captain? You've picked a very bad being to anger."

"Enough," snapped Lobcock. He twisted his fingers in Crowley's hair and pulled his head back, forcing him to meet the flat steel-grey of the captain's eyes. "Whatever else," Lobcock announced, low but carrying, "let this day prove that the so-called demon Antony is no more than a man, and just as mortal."

Crowley didn't think twice, didn't bother to resist the impulse — he hissed and struck, teeth snapping together a hairsbreadth from Lobcock's nose as the man jerked back out of range just in time to avoid losing it. He was still laughing hysterically when the captain punched him in the stomach.

Crowley tried to sell it, he really did. But humans tended only to see the surface of things — they never seemed to notice until too late that being a serpent, he was all core strength, layered in whipcord muscle enough to hold all his disparate bones together and upright in defiance of both God and gravity. Curling up around the blow was out of the question, stretched out as he was, and the strangled grunt which escaped him had more to do with the jolt of agony that shot up his leg as he was knocked off-balance. Evidently that was not sufficiently convincing, since Lobcock struck him again across the face a moment later. That one hurt more.

Lobcock stepped back, shaking out his hand. "Bring out the cat."

Crowley began to experience an inkling of foreboding, which expanded to a respectable current when he saw what must be the British bosun's mate retrieve a red baize bag from below the deck of the cruiser still lashed alongside the _Apophis._ That explained why they'd strung him up like this, instead of tying him to the mast or one of the shrouds — it meant that his crew would be able to see his face, and he theirs, when the long arm of the Crown enacted upon him the foremost desire in each of their minds.

Not all out of pure sadism, though the Royal Navy did have an impressive tendency to breed that in its corps like influenza or dysentery, each generation of authority figures inculcating in the next otherwise unconscionable levels of violence. Most of them did indeed perceive this as justice, or at least revenge, which few of them would be able to articulate a meaningful difference between if pressed. They craved, for reasons they thought logical and good, and which agreed in most general respects with arguments stated by important people in knowing tones, that Crowley reap the suffering he had so richly sown and then so egregiously evaded. Others were merely driven by cowardice: the desperate prayer of _please, please, anything, just so long as it's him and not me,_ the ultimate aim of a culture of corporal punishment — that its members could be incited to go along with any atrocity demanded of them not merely without protest but with the greatest enthusiasm they could muster, out of the knee-liquefying fear that any sign of reluctance would mark them as the next scapegoat.

The English vice, Crowley would fruitlessly expound to Aziraphale when he was especially drunk and unguarded, was founded not in some twisted-up longing for violence but the particular cowardice of the Stiff Upper Lip, wherein an entire empire had literally beaten into its citizens the idea that emotionless passivity in the face of unendurable violence was the very foundation of courage, and thereby that any sign of perturbation or noncompliance demonstrated moral dereliction of the worst kind.

_All that it takes for evil to prevail,_ Crowley would insist earnestly, _is to entrap good men in an environment that obliges them to do nothing._

The angel tended to get rather snippy over that.

"Applying the standard sentence of one dozen lashes for theft," pronounced Lobcock, "and accounting for at least sixty known attacks against legitimate ships and the theft of their cargo and personal property, as well as no doubt countless assaults of which no survivors remained to tell the tale; and given an estimated three days' return to port under prevailing winds…let all present bear witness to the demon Antony's punishment for the first hundred lashes, after which each man may in turn take a recess from his duties to administer his portion of the remainder until his arm tires. Lieutenant Calloway, I place the _pro tem_ command of the _Apophis_ in your hands."

At this Ayo began screaming through her gag and fighting against her captors so fiercely that another four had to run to help tie her down to the quarterdeck rail. The screaming did not abate until one of them brought the hilt of his sword across her jaw with an audible crack of bone. 

Jagged sobs continued to echo from that direction as Crowley closed his eyes, feeling sick. From the sound of things, the British crew abruptly had their hands full preventing a riot of sixty-plus bound and furious prisoners with nothing to lose, but all Crowley could think was _hanging would have been kinder._

Lobcock didn't mean for Crowley to survive long _enough_ to be executed. He'd be lucky if he lasted out the hour. Or unlucky, as the case might be.

At least Supply & Logistics would be happy to know that this body had perished ensuring a tidy collection of damned souls, no matter that he hadn't actually needed to lift a finger. Shouldn't be more than a year, five at the outside, before they sent him right back up to keep up the bad work with a new one.

It was a neat little loophole, Crowley had to give the captain that. These days, death was the favoured form of punishment by the British government and its subsidiaries, under the philosophy that unduly harsh sentences would serve as an effective deterrent against all forms of crime, never mind the obstinate refusal of the upper classes to alleviate the conditions that drove people to crime in the first place. Addressing any of the demon Antony's other crimes, or even considering his appropriations in total rather than as individual misdemeanours, would preclude this public demonstration entirely. Grand larceny? Death. Homicide? Death. Treason? Death. It was a masterwork of incitement signed and sealed in blood.

What _wasn't_ a loophole, Crowley knew because he made a point of it to keep up with these things, was that the amendments to the British naval code in recent years prohibited punishments of more than a dozen lashes for any crime not severe enough to be brought before a court, and suggested meaningfully that these sentences be administered in several fractional sessions over a period of days should the constitution of the sailor in question be insufficient to suffer them without being laid out entirely. Not that this stopped anyone with the minimum necessary ingenuity to penalise every infraction separately; without oversight on the open sea, often the only protection a ship's crew had was desertion or mutiny, each of which risked opening its own bag of cats, as it were.

What _also_ wasn't a loophole, more importantly, was that the Royal Navy enjoined its commanding officers to read out the Articles of War before administering punishment, so as to ingrain into every man aboard the catechism of what he had to fear. But that might bring attention to the inconvenient little interdiction against abusing prisoners, and Captain Lobcock had proven himself disinterested with such mawkish concerns.

Clearly the man considered himself one of those captains who governed their ship with a firm hand. Little wonder Lobcock's crew was so eager to see someone who so brazenly flouted all normal rules of conduct suffer the cat's claws for a change. Who was it that had said flogging turns a good man bad and a bad man worse? There was someone who had the right of it.

Crowley clutched at the rope holding him up, fighting to stabilise his balance. He was horribly conscious of the edges of this body: the rough splintery grain of the rope against his wrists and palms, too tight, barely allowing enough movement to chafe; the hot-cold pulsating pain in his fingertips where he'd broken or torn away the nails in his struggle, blood trickling down along his fingers and settling in the creases of his hands; every salt-tinged breath moving in and out of his lungs, and the capricious wind brushing the bared skin of his back; the muscles in his left leg as they shifted, working to keep him upright; the dead weight of his right dragging against the swaying deck, bandaged and blood-soaked, fluctuating from moment to moment and movement to movement between a dull banked-fire burn and the unbearable shock of a white-hot brand. It occurred to him, as it did periodically, that humans must feel like this all the time, trapped helplessly within their immutable bonds of matter. It was really no wonder they invented things just to cope.

The prisoners' revolt was brutal but short-lived. Though the Navy ship was the smaller, sleek and low-slung, and correspondingly carried far fewer men, it had come upon the _Apophis_ just as the pirates were commencing to board their obeisant prey; aiming for the middle and upper decks, targeting artillery and crew, flinging many of the boarders from their precarious positions and stranding others on the far deck without reinforcements, it took out a solid half of the pirates in the crossfire before engaging the remainder hand-to-hand. Bound, battered, and held at bay, the survivors still capable of struggle didn't stand a chance of actually overwhelming their captors, but Crowley was touched that they'd tried.

"Petty Officer Bowen," Lobcock commanded once order had been more or less restored, "you will keep count."

_I didn't even kill anyone who wasn't trying to kill me first,_ Crowley thought bitterly as the bosun's mate drew his arm back. That was one facet of the outrageous loyalty he'd managed to inspire as captain of the _Apophis_ — he always delegated such decisions to the crew, and then granted them full commission to carry out the results. It didn't absolve him, Crowley knew perhaps better than anyone, but it at least helped him sleep at night.

Then the tails cracked against his bare back, and Crowley's thoughts stuttered to a bright, blinding blank.

"One!"

_All right,_ Crowley thought, dragging himself back up onto his good foot by his wrists alone, electric pain pulsing up through his hip and grounding itself somewhere beneath his ribs. _All right. This is fine. I can handle this._ It could be worse. They could be beating him; Crowley had broken a few bones in his time, and could easily imagine the pain where the spar had gone through him flaring magnesium-white in every joint and limb in his body instead of just the one. Hell, it could be the iron maiden, for that matter. In the annals of gratuitous evil, Captain Roger Lobcock barely rated.

"Two!"

Crowley hissed. _Could be the rack. Or scarpines. Fuck, but the Spaniards were depraved bastards._

"Three!"

Crowley didn't have much of a frame of reference to compare the sensation to. Given his ability to bend reality to his will, he seldom endured physical pain in the first place; when he did, he could usually heal it sooner rather than later. _Meta_ physical pain, now — _that_ he was familiar with, on far greater occasion and magnitude than he would ever have wished. But it was an entirely different category of experience.

"Four!"

The closest comparison he could think of was hellfire. It burned, yes — but it was a familiar burn, comforting in how honestly it wanted to consume you, invigorating as long as you didn't try to channel too much of it at once and burn yourself up.

"Five!"

The impact wrenched a strained whine out from between his clenched teeth. Crowley had given up trying to keep his feet by now; there was barely enough time between lashes to pull himself up before the next blow knocked him off them again, and it just hurt his wounded leg more than dangling freely.

"Six!"

That one caught on the sharp edge of his shoulder blade, tearing a bloody gash in the skin, and Crowley yelped. "Fuck!"

"Seven!"

"Ssshit, _bastard—"_

"Eight!"

Fuck _this_ — Crowley started struggling again, twisting to get away, so that the next strike caught him from hip to ribcage. "Fucking water of fucking Miriam! _Fuck!"_

"Nine!"

That one knocked the air out of his lungs so powerfully that he didn't even have the breath to swear. He managed to choke down the start of an inhalation just in time for the next blow to force it out of him again.

"Ten!"

Crowley gasped, boots slipping uselessly against the deck in an instinctive attempt to brace himself. Hard to distinguish between the pain in his leg and his back now — it was all starting to become one awful, all-encompassing whole.

"Eleven!"

_Could be worse. I could be getting burnt alive. Or keelhauled._

"Twelve!"

He could feel blood trickling down his back, soaking into the waistband of his trousers.

"Thirteen!"

_Or crucified. At least no one's going to expect me to carry a cross anywhere after this._

"Fourteen!"

His mouth tasted like blood, legitimately like blood instead of the mere prick of Lobcock's sword earlier. It took a moment for the rest of his brain to catch up and realise he'd bitten his tongue.

"Fifteen!"

There were sounds coming from him again, continuous and alien, like those of a wounded animal. Crowley couldn't breathe. He could feel his chest heaving unevenly, the architecture of his ribs expanding under the burning striations in the flesh of his back, trying and failing to find a working rhythm before the next blow ripped another cry of pain out of him.

"Sixteen!"

All the strength in his arms was gone, the muscles of his back and shoulders trembling uncontrollably; he wouldn't be capable of pulling himself back to his feet if he tried. Crowley was fairly sure he was blacking out momentarily with each strike of the cat's tails. Hard to tell, given that loss of consciousness was a defining feature thereof. If his serpent's eyes were capable of shedding tears, he had no doubt he would be. Eyes were always the hardest thing for a demon to change, though.[3] Even if he wanted to, there was no way he could exert enough control over his corporeal form at the moment to manage it, anyhow.

"Seventeen!"

Avoiding Ayo's tearstained gaze, he met the single remaining eye of Isaac Freedman, staring emptily through him. The other had been lost to the same whip scar that crossed from jaw to scalp and slashed a permanent leer into his upper lip. More such scars decorated his shoulders and crisscrossed his back and limbs, where he'd steadily spent the last four years tattooing over them with intricate blackwork filigree. Crowley looked away.

"Eighteen!"

_Could be a proper whip. Or, or a scourge. Tear through flesh like paper, all those lead weights and nails and things._

"Nineteen!"

He was used to feeling weak. Hell liked to cultivate that, remind everyone how little they mattered, how little their suffering mattered, that the only thing about them that mattered was how they could further the plans of Their Master Below; that they were at the slender, disinterested mercy of powers that regarded them at best as questionably useful tools and at the most realistic like some loathsome insect whose destruction was deferred only by some arbitrary forbearance, or curiosity, or fastidious distaste for the mess it would produce. The Almighty, too, had made the Divine Policy clear, in fits of vengeance that condemned millions to death and perdition at the slightest lift of one holy finger. This felt like a very different sort of weakness: the demon pirate Antony, merciless terror of the Caribbean, immortal and invincible, stirring murderers and thieves to a bloodthirsty frenzy with his smiling snake's tongue, now sobbing like a child in front of former slaves and hardened mariners under a bit of vigorous lashing.

"Twenty!"

_Come on, Antony. Where's that stiff upper lip? Quit snivelling and take your lumps like a man._

"Twenty-one!"

He couldn't handle it. His back was aflame, inching dangerously close to memories Crowley wrenched himself away from, of burning wings and boiling plasma. He hadn't signed up to have the fucking skin ripped off his _fucking_ back, he'd never been _fucking flayed_ before and he _couldn't take it—_

"Twenty-two!"

It was too much. He was being consumed, hellfire scorching through his veins and spilling out the edges of him, shredding ravenously through the subaetheric bonds that held him together, incinerating him in a perpetual insatiable fission reaction until there was nothing left of the being called Crowley but faint strands of energy dissipating into the darkness of absolute zero.

"Twenty-three!"

_Could be worse,_ Crowley thought, but he couldn't quite articulate how before the next strike cracked through his brain with the grace and aplomb of a sparrow hitting the ground at terminal velocity.

"Twenty-four!"

_Stop,_ thought Crowley helplessly.

"Twenty-five!"

_Stop._

"Twenty-six!"

_Please._

"Twenty-seven!"

_Please, please stop._

"Twenty-eight!"

Crowley wasn't thinking anymore. His whole being was pain, inescapable; he couldn't remember how to imagine anything else.

Somewhere around the mid-thirties, the bosun's mate handed off the lash to someone else. Crowley hung bonelessly by his wrists for a few moments, choking on irregular whimpering breaths, blood dripping freely from his mouth and back. He was pretty sure something had torn, or rather gotten torn through, in the muscle of one shoulder; he couldn't tense it at all now, and trying to do so only made the pain more intense, which was apparently possible because God was — in his educated opinion — a sadistic prick.

"Thirty-seven!"

_Fuck you,_ Crowley thought in a vaguely upward direction.

"Thirty-eight!"

There was a distinctly meaty sound to the cat's tails striking his back now, like a cleaver being embedded in a side of beef. Crowley saw something reddish moving in his peripheral vision, assumed it was another lock of hair that had come loose from its ponytail and fallen into his face; when he turned his head to shake it away, though, all he saw was flecks of blood streaking from the ends of the lash to splatter across the deck.

_Ah. Right._

"Thirty-nine!"

He swung loosely from the creaking rope in a greyish daze punctuated only by the rhythmic crack of the lash blazing vivid scarlet across the insides of his eyelids. Someone was still shouting the count, but his ears weren't parsing it as language, and it seemed to be coming from very far away.

* * *

**Footnotes:**

[1] And about a dozen kids ranging from infancy to their late teens, miraculously kept alive and undetected amidst the restless animals and cramped darkness throughout the forty-day voyage. If anyone ever asked, which Crowley was adamant to ensure they would not, it was all a matter of undermining God's plan and facilitating the continued spread of unchecked depravity. [return to text]

[2] Typically this custom was viewed with a similar cruel irony as marooning a person on a deserted island with a pistol containing a single bullet, under the assumption that if God didn't sort the matter out, the natural course of events would. Crowley, although he was not God, did have certain preternatural methods of perception and the ability to influence the natural course of events; he also felt that one couldn't very well build a proper reputation without at least leaving _somebody_ alive to tell the tale, preferably somebody who had particular cause to hate you. [return to text]

[3] That and the feet, for some reason. Probably something to do with direct foci of interaction with God's creation. [return to text]


	2. Devil's Daughter

Crowley came to drenched and burning, and screaming, and screaming, and his boots scrabbled against the slippery surface of the deck, and he was screaming and it was no longer by any stretch of the imagination a human sound, ripping apart the air like a serrated knife, and his lips tasted like salt, and he was screaming; and then a second bucket of seawater splashed over his back and head and he couldn't scream because he was gasping, too breathless for sound, and then he was screaming again, and something seemed to snap like a violin string in his throat and his voice gave out, and everything _burned._

"What the—"

"—blazes _was_ that—"

"—don't think he's human—"

"—heard what the captain said—"

"—don't think he's a _he."_

Amid the overlapping mutters around him, Crowley grew gradually aware that what few clothes he'd been allowed to keep had gotten, firstly, thoroughly shredded by the cat's tails; and, subsequently, doused with seawater, plastering them to his skin where they didn't fall inevitable victim to gravity. _Right. Shit. Didn't think that would be an issue, to be honest._

It was just common sense, wasn't it? In tight quarters like these, it simply wasn't worth the effort to keep everyone from noticing that you never used the head or undressed in their vicinity; and while Crowley'd had the basic prudence to wear a cock like everybody else present when he'd first signed on, in a crew that was more than a quarter women or woman-adjacent, all parading around with a bunch of sensitive dangly bits was good for was getting them kicked in the heat of battle. It wasn't as if there was anything he'd needed to prove.

_What, like they could do anything worse than they were planning on doing to me anyway?_ Crowley would have sneered if he were stupid, or not a denizen of Hell, or couldn't sense the shift in atmosphere like an exquisitely-calibrated barometer.

It could _always_ get worse. And, if you were damned, it was pretty much certain that it would, by definition.

Lobcock's shiny black boots — heroically aglisten with drying blood, Crowley observed from this angle — came to a stop a few feet in front of him. With an effort that set every nerve in his upper back alight, Crowley raised his head to find the captain studying him with an odd, thoughtful expression glittering in his pale eyes. He slid a hand around Crowley's abused throat to hold him firmly in place, keeping carefully out of range of his teeth — an intelligent precaution, even if Crowley doubted he had the strength to attack again at this point — and gripped the torn fabric of his breeches with the other, ripping them open far enough to expose him the rest of the way. "James, is it?" he murmured, slipping a finger down between the lips of Crowley's cunt as if to confirm its existence.

"'M curious," slurred Crowley. "What is your plan if I do turn out to be a demon, exactly?"

"If you were a demon," Lobcock replied as unflappably as if he weren't groping a prisoner in front of both of their entire crews, "I highly doubt you could have been brought low by such mundane means in the first place." He withdrew his hand from between Crowley's legs to unsheathe his sword from its scabbard. "Under the circumstances, I suspect that you've been violating standards of basic decency for quite some time without any need for supernatural intervention whatsoever." In one smooth motion, he slit Crowley's shirt open to expose his flat and (but for, indeed, a pebbled scattering of vermillion scales shading to iridescent black along his sides) entirely unremarkable chest. Lobcock's eyebrows rose, more in condescension than surprise. "Hm."

"Oh," hissed Crowley, unable to resist, "and I suppose Captain _Roger Harwood Lobcock_ would know a thing or two about being _morally upright—"_

Lobcock rammed his knee into Crowley's injured thigh.

_All right,_ Crowley acknowledged once his brain could form words again, _I did earn that one._

"More so than a woman," Lobcock said coolly over Crowley's breathless keening as he circled around to cut away the rest of his clothes, leaving him only in his boots and the bandage around his thigh, and being none too careful to avoid the occasional nick from his blade, "who styles herself a man and a demon and takes to the high seas because she knows herself to be incapable of conforming to the expectations of _upright_ society."

"More of a man than you, you three-inch bull's pizzle," cried Beatriz, who'd gotten so excited over the character in _Much Ado,_ "you pigeon-livered coward, you—"

_No,_ thought Crowley desperately as the commotion amongst the captured pirates threatened to boil over again, _no, keep your eyes on me, I'm the ringleader here, I'm the one responsible, I can take it, they've all gone through enough already—_

He could see the thoughts going through Lobcock's mind, and they weren't pleasant ones. A real classical misogynist, this one — believed that women existed to be either decorative or mothers, and smouldered with the barely-suppressed desire to punish anyone with the audacity not to conform to whatever preconceived roles he approved of, which covered pretty much everyone else other than well-to-do Englishmen. _That's right,_ urged Crowley as the captain's narrowed eyes flicked between him and the crew, _you want to make an example of me, don't you? Show everyone what happens when someone deviates from the straight-and-narrow. Shut me up. Not that way,_ he amended hastily in response to the transient image of Crowley choking on Lobcock's lobcock, _because of the teeth, can't forget to watch out for the teeth. But you'd better be careful, make sure no one else can get in the way, because it's three days back to the coast and you might not be able to keep order here for much longer…_

"Stanton," snapped Lobcock, "get this sorry lot below before we have another riot on our hands. Lieutenants Calloway and Ward, make the _Apophis_ and _Cygnus_ ready for sail. We'll be escorting the _Cassiopeia_ back to port to forestall further incident. Jensen and Povey, tie our good Mistress Antony—" _Captain,_ thought Crowley spitefully, _it's Captain, you presumptuous twat —_ "fast to the mast. Facing outward, if you please. All of you, reconvene here before we set off."

Jensen and Povey exchanged a set of measuring glances as their fellow omphaloi sprang into activity around them, some with, frankly, exactly the amount of relish their combative prisoners brought upon themselves as they were manhandled in the direction of the brig. "I'll play out the rope," Povey declared abruptly, moving off toward where it was hitched before Jensen could respond.

"Oh, lovely, thanks," groused Jensen, "I'll just brave the teeth, then, shall I?"

"Take her from behind, if you're so worried!" called Povey, speeding up. "Not going to make the laundry any worse, is it?"

Jensen took in the dark splashes of blood all over his nice red marine's uniform, closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, breathed in and out slowly through his nose, and glared flatly at Crowley. "Right. Cause any trouble and it'll go harder for you, got it?"

Crowley, who could sense exactly how much harder it would go, elected to continue playing half-dead, which did not take a great deal of acting. Jensen took another deep breath, then circled around to his back. Crowley could not stop himself from tensing in dreadful precognisance, despite the immediate regret it produced in every ravaged nerve and sinew.

A fist dug into his hair and yanked his head back so Jensen could get an arm around Crowley's neck. A hoarse noise writhed up his throat and out between his teeth at the pressure of the body against his back, each button and buckle an individual shard of sparkling pain, and Crowley's body tried to thrash away of its own accord, prompting Jensen to frantically tighten his grip. He could hear Jensen shout something to Povey, but his mind wouldn't translate it — all he could process was Jensen jerking him backwards, off-balance; the numbing jolt up the right side of his body when he tried to catch himself; the scrape of every sticky-outy bit against his raw flesh at the slightest motion. Jensen kicked his legs out from under him, a lightning-flash of sensory overload amid the dizzying dark, and Crowley lost track of things for a bit.

A few impressions made it through. The momentary relief of air against his back as Jensen released his stranglehold and shoved Crowley against the mast — thick rope encircling his chest and pulling him hard against the wood — sagging an excruciating few inches as the tension on his wrists diminished before they were pulled up again and secured to the iron bracket above his head. His hands were numb. Lucky he didn't have to worry about gangrene, Crowley supposed. One way or another.

He couldn't remember how to breathe. That was fine.

More pertinently, Crowley seemed to be more cold-blooded than he was used to these days, because between the gathering dusk and the water soaking every inch of skin, he was beginning to shiver uncontrollably in the ocean breeze, an unpleasant counterpoint to the merciless heat radiating through his back. (Did snakes shiver? He was only familiar with his own jury-rigged incorporation, which didn't entirely follow the conventional rules of either man or animal, and it had been absolute ages since he'd read Aja'ib al-Makhluqat, not that al-Qazvini or most of his successors had been too closely attached to such mundane concerns as scientific fact in the first place. Linnaeus's recent work had seemed promising, but Crowley found it so dry upon attempted reading that he'd fobbed it off on Aziraphale at the first opportunity.)

Somehow, he didn't think asking for a blanket would go over very well.

Jensen had stationed himself next to the mast, looking alert with his hand on the hilt of his sword — a respectable method of shirking the more strenuous work involved in getting the heavily-damaged _Apophis_ fit to sail with a crew a fraction of the size she usually required, and a method that'd probably win him points with the captain, besides. Crowley watched vaguely as a few seamen gathered the more intact bodies and parts thereof to weigh down with ballast and tip over the side before they could start putrefying. Géraud and Dakila would be buried together. That was sort of nice. Less nice for Esmée, who'd have to face the gallows alone, now.

Less nice, also, that their immortal souls would not be able to take much consolation from the state of their mortal remains. Crowley had done good work on them — or, well, effective work — as he had with the entirety of his crew. He supposed there was always an outside chance they might go up instead of down, but Heaven tended to take a dim view of unrepentant murder and pillaging and the like. Probably the best they could hope for was that someone would take notice of their aptitude for rationalising all manner of sin and desecration and put them to work, rather than forever condemning them to the station of eternally-renewable psychic fuel. Crowley would have to see if he could put in a good word for them.[4]

It seemed as if he blinked, and suddenly the sun was fully below the horizon, the sky a deep and luminescent purple. Crowley shifted and felt the immediate consequences like spikes of ice hammered into every joint. His hands, while still numb, were now at the same time vaguely hot and throbbing. It was yet another of those human learning experiences he could have gone his whole existence without.

Crowley wondered momentarily what had awoken him, and then his conscious mind caught up to reality and recognised the gleaming spearhead of cruelty approaching from his left, redolent with the heady tang of blood amid the tobacco-sweet miasma of intent that hung over the ship entire.

"Right," mumbled Crowley, resigned. "If we're going down the checklist, can I at least have some rum first?"

Lobcock slid the callused weight of his hand down Crowley's thigh and dug his nails viciously into the bloodied bandage, eliciting a strangled scream.

"If I were you," said Lobcock once Crowley had run out of breath to do more than gasp like a beached fish, "I would take what little time you have left on this Earth to reflect on your sins, and pray that God in His wisdom might even take mercy on such a wretched abomination as yourself."

This, thought Crowley, would be a prime moment to do something impressively defiant, like spit blood in Lobcock's face. But he was cold, and struggling to hold on to consciousness, and in more physical pain than he had ever felt in his life, and if he were honest with himself — which he tried to be when it mattered, because you couldn't very well keep up appearances when you didn't know the shape of the reality you were concealing — terrified out of his bloody wits, because he could feel what kind of man Lobcock was, and the wrath pouring off him might be one of Hell's favoured delicacies but right now it was all aimed at _Crowley,_ every grievance and vendetta and stifled lust for retribution focused on a single acceptable target like summer sunlight through a magnifying glass. Most of the sailors present thought of Crowley as little more than a warm quim at the moment, one that they could treat without the care demanded by prostitutes or wives; perhaps even one that they could revenge themselves on, whether for his perceived crimes or as a convenient proxy for others who'd somehow wronged them. But Lobcock…

He wouldn't just make it hurt. He'd make it a deliberate, thorough torture designed to break Crowley beyond any hope of repair. He'd take as long as possible to ruin him until Crowley was no longer capable even of begging for death, then turn him over to the rest of his crew for more.

Vanity. Play on his vanity. Lobcock had an abundance of that, with his shiny shoes and sharply-pressed uniform and posh accent and casuistic veneration of protocol, with that seafarer's tan that proved he was a proper working professional but never to be suspected of actual _swarthiness,_ God forbid; with his Roman nose and strong bone structure hidden beneath an incipient jowlish softness, and the way he held himself so blessed aloof, like blood could never dare be accused of sullying his hands. _Do you really want to debase yourself in front of all your men like this?_ Crowley insinuated, snaring Lobcock's cold grey gaze with his own. _Allow them to realise that you, too, are nothing more than human, subject to animal lust — and from there, perhaps even to other flaws? Will they look at you with respect after this, do you think, or will they always picture you with your roger buried in a half-conscious carnival freak, **Captain Lobcock?** How long do you think you'd be able to keep yourself from overhearing the jokes after crossing that Rubicon?_

Aloud, teeth bared in a bloody grin, Crowley panted, "'Fraid I've already…promised my soul to Someone Else. And when I see Him…I'll tell Him to keep an eye out for you, Captain."

Lobcock backhanded him.

_Well,_ thought Crowley dazedly as a rough hand forced his jaw open to shove a wad of dark fabric between his teeth — he recognised it as a leftover shred of his breeches, saltwater and blood stinging his lacerated tongue — and tied it in place with another, so tightly that Crowley was once again thankful he didn't necessarily require air to survive, _that went about as well as could be expected._

"Gentlemen," announced Lobcock to his gathered crew, "in light of your stellar service to the Crown, I hereby grant you free rein to do as you please to the so-called demon Antony, seeing as she has been so eager to debase herself in every manner known to God or man, as well as presumably some not known to either. As previously established, those remaining on the _Apophis_ will be granted a recess from their duties as the opportunity so arises, and thus those who will be manning the _Cygnus_ on our return trip to port may take the first shift."

There was an uncomfortable susurrus of awkward shifting and nervous laughter amongst the crew. No one moved.

"Look," said one of them, _"somebody's_ got to go first."

"Oh, do you have the guts for it, then?" another voice replied acidly. "Go ahead, Povey. She's probably got teeth down below, too."

A somewhat louder smattering of laughter rippled through the crowd. Crowley had only a moment to ardently entertain the notion before cold panic set in; he could all too easily envision the variety of implements and activities his captors might resort to at even the mere prospect of such a _wretched abomination_ so emasculating one of their own. _Don't be stupid,_ he projected frantically. _Do you think the Captain would still have all his fingers, if I did? Look at me. I'm **beaten**. Harmless. When was the last time you had anything better to fuck than your own hand or a cutpurse doxy, anyway?_

The current of bodies — in the way of such crowds, with no identifiable individuals being responsible — pushed Povey to the front, hands slapping his back in either encouragement or farewell as he passed. Povey, a plump, sunburnt young man, put on a weak show of bravado, swaggering a few steps forward before turning to tip his head deferentially in Lobcock's direction. "Oh, ye of little faith. Weren't you watching? Our valiant captain has already defanged her."

With no other warning than a second's hesitation, Povey closed the remaining distance and shoved his fingers into Crowley's cunt.

Crowley barely had time to imagine himself wet before the intrusion filled him, driving the breath from his lungs in a pathetic cry of protest. He'd had sex before, of course he'd had sex before, you couldn't spend nearly six thousand years in a human body tempting people to all kinds of exciting depravity without getting curious what all the fuss was about and trying a few of them yourself, but it had — been a while, and he hadn't done anything with this particular cunt yet, and it was possible that Crowley had never been so utterly unaroused by someone pushing their way inside him. He tried to relax, and mostly just ended up hyperventilating.

Povey thrust his fingers roughly in and out, palming himself through his trousers, and Crowley couldn't bite back the doglike whimpers that escaped through the gag. He was shuddering with the effort not to move — the bracket he was hanging from was positioned to be within reach for a man of average height, significantly shorter than himself, so his legs were strewn limply akimbo like those of a rag doll; he had neither the strength nor the leverage to pull away and thereby press his back harder against the mast, nor could he attempt to close his legs without putting more weight on his injury. He squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his jaw so tightly it hurt.

"I think she likes it, lads," Povey called out in a complete misinterpretation of Crowley's pained whine as he scissored his fingers to stretch Crowley wider, prompting a chorus of wolf-whistles and crude suggestions from his audience. "I'd say she probably does this all the time with her own crew, but she's so da— so _blasted_ tight I don't think any of them would have her." He grinned, unbuttoning his breeches to pull out his half-hard cock and stroke it to full mast. "Imagine that. The world's worst succubus. How long d'you think she's been gagging for something like this?"

He pulled his fingers out so he could line his cock up with Crowley's hole and, anchoring his free hand on Crowley's hip, began to push inside.

Crowley _howled._ It wasn't so much the penetration, though that hurt too — a dull, deep, stinging ache, too much and too soon — but the grip on his side and the weight of Povey's body forcing him against the weathered wood, dragging each wound in his raw and bloodied flesh open further as Povey started to move. Crowley was sobbing again, silently begging, _stop, please stop, please, God—_

He bit his tongue on the thought as soon as he thought it. What was the point? Worse things happened to the humans every day, and the Almighty actually loved _them._ (His mind went to the remnants of his crew in the hold, and all the billions of souls abandoned to the machinations of Crowley and his ilk.) Fuck, compared to childbirth, this was _nothing—_

(Another part of Crowley's mind pointed out that to his recollection, Eve at least had never been _fucking flayed—)_

—so what was the prayer of a demon going to accomplish? He already _knew_ God wanted him to suffer. At best he'd just attract the Almighty's attention, and then it was even odds between getting laughed at or smited on top of everything else.

At least Povey was warm.

_"Ah —_ you all a-are missing _out,"_ Povey groaned into the side of Crowley's neck. "I'll try to leave some for the rest of you, but no promises—"

At least Crowley wasn't human. At least there was no risk of him getting pregnant, given that he'd seen no reason to form the internal organs typically associated with this set of genitals; at least he had no need for a functioning excretory system, and thus wouldn't face the humiliating, painful, potentially lifelong complications of internal tearing or ruptures that might haunt a more ordinary victim of rape. (At least he'd been fortunate enough to maintain that much dignity — Crowley, who had seen humanity in some of its direst straits over his millennia on Earth, knew full well that he long ago would have soiled himself out of sheer pain and loss of command over his body if he'd been capable.) At least if he died, he could pop right back up afterwards, no need to worry about permanent consequences. At least, despite the fear and the pain and the helplessness, none of this was a true violation of self; it was just a material shell, after all, just a bundle of blood and bone and nerves that let him walk among the humans as if he were one of them. Just a temporary, flawed interface to puppeteer without the exigencies of directly dominating another living being's will.

At least, no matter how unpleasant (Crowley thought, in the gaps between each wave of overwhelming agony crashing over the shores of his mind, when he could think at all) he knew this would eventually be over.

Rape was a bit of an odd duck, as sins went. It lay somewhere between violence, as an act of harm committed against the body, and theft, as an act of forcibly taking that which one had no right to — the word even derived from the Latin in that sense, _rapere_ , to seize or abduct. That wasn't all there was to it, though. There was the element of betrayal, the corruption of an act of pleasure or love into an assault on the victim's will; and of subjugation, in forcing the victim to submit to something, no matter how willing they might otherwise have been, that they had no choice in. It violated by turning the victim's will and body against themselves, co-opting them as a tool of the perpetrator, whether for carnal use or the more outwardly benevolent enslavement of the victim as a spouse and parent. Human laws never seemed to know quite what to make of it — half the time they seemed to treat it as a matter of reparation and compelled the perpetrator to marry and provide for the victim, when they could agree on how to judge such accusations at all.

In his early years on Earth, Crowley hadn't understood what the big deal had been. Coveting your neighbour's wife — that wasn't much different from adultery, or envy, or something, right? He'd thought of it as one of the milder sins he could tempt someone into, just the barest nudge to tip them over from thought to action, letting them indulge the passions the Almighty had built into the design in the first place. He hadn't realised the implications, the depth of hurt it could cause. As usual, humanity pioneered forms of suffering that Hell could only dream of.

Crowley had done a lot of things he did his best not to think about, over the course of his long, long existence.

Captain James Antony didn't abide rape or any of the myriad other possible forms of sexual coercion on his ship. Not because it was _a special kind of evil,_ as seemed to be the prevailing wisdom amongst the pearl-clutching set these days — Crowley was familiar with, and had in fact written a number of underappreciated monographs on, a far greater variety of far more vicious and profound kinds of evil than the mere perversion of the union between human souls — but because, firstly, it damaged crew cohesion and engendered resentment and mistrust within a group already brimming with justified grievances against such activity; and, secondly, because Ayo and a respectable fraction of the rest of the crew would do far worse things to the perpetrator than Crowley would before he ever got the chance to.

Hell didn't quite understand rape, as a whole. They had an easy enough time grasping that On High had declared it a sin, and therefore encouraged their Earthly agents to encourage it when possible; but most demons existed spiritually, not physically, and therefore viewed the whole subject of sexual intercourse as akin to animals rutting, distasteful at best and revoltingly primitive at worst. Of those that did have a reason to be issued physical bodies, they were more likely to get overexcited by the whole subject of erogenous zones and invent themselves an entire sensorium only tangentially related to human reproductive anatomy than set out to accost anyone for any more intentionally malevolent ends than mere thoughtless enthusiasm. If demons wanted to torture humans via sexual means, their minds tended to go to things like pears of anguish or crushing a person's testicles to the consistency of thinly-spread jam. All the psychological subtleties that actually made the act a sin — the attack on another being's body and will, the pain it caused, the long-term impacts on the victim's sense of self and conception of others — were simply too similar to Hell's overall philosophy on motivation for most demons to conceive of that particular brand of cruelty.[5] If Crowley ever mentioned this ordeal to any of his colleagues, the best he could hope for would be a blank stare accompanied by "…and?" The worst — probably he'd be demoted from Earth, if not outright deemed defective and either subjected to being broken down and remoulded into the ideal model of what a demon _ought_ to be or simply strung up on a metaphorical meathook for Hell's bored sadists to play with until the last glimmers of his consciousness unraveled back to the insentient void from whence he came. Most likely, should news of this incident ever get out, he'd just get mocked for how easily he'd let a pack of glorified apes incapacitate him and reduce him to the point of abject begging until it became as much of his demonic legacy as "Crawly".

(It had been nearly _two thousand years._ Even slow as some demons might be to adjust to change, you'd think the message would have gotten through by this point.) 

Povey finished quickly, as such things went, though Crowley was excruciatingly aware of every waking second that passed before the boy stiffened, shuddered, and spilled into him, pressing against Crowley with a force that wrung a shattered moan out of his wrecked body. He wondered briefly, as Povey pulled back and stuffed himself back into his trousers before pinching his cheek with a wink and a condescending "Hope you enjoyed that as much as I did, sweetheart," whether it was better or worse that he couldn't cry. Probably his captors would take equal triumph in hurting him as in convincing themselves that they were wresting lust out of him instead of pain.

_You, and everyone who stood back and laughed with you,_ Crowley promised the anxious, callow, desperately posturing young man before him, high on his own audacity and relief as he accepted the plaudits and not-so-good-natured ribbing of his fellows, _will have nightmares of all the things you fear most, for the rest of your lives, which will seem to last for an eternity and from which you will be unable to rouse yourselves, try though you might._

He would have cursed them all with a veritable menagerie of venereal diseases for good measure, just out of spite, but that didn't seem fair to anyone else this boatload of cretins might treat similarly. Most likely they already had an impressive collection to their names anyway, if they shared their other sexual conquests like this. Crowley wouldn't be surprised.

There, that was another silver lining to being a demon. No clap.[6]

"Who's next?" came the call from the crowd, "Who's next?" before Povey declaimed over the sudden raucous surge of enthusiasm, "Lieutenant, perhaps you'd like to take advantage of the privileges of office?"

Lieutenant Ward, who preferred to make use of a cunt before it was fucked loose and overflowing with the mixed spend of a dozen of his fellows — lovely image, that — did. He was a tall, thin, skeletal man, as if someone had, for reasons of their own, taken an individual of normal proportions and rolled them out with a rolling pin to produce someone assured to bump his head on every beam and board belowdecks in the fleet. As he approached, he graced Crowley with a roguish smirk that probably attracted every uniform-chaser in the Atlantic, which was so disorienting that Crowley's beleaguered brain failed to process the inevitable geometry of the situation until Ward was standing directly over him.

_Shit, oh fuck, nonono—_

A resounding slap knocked the dread right out Crowley's skull for a moment. He glared up at the lieutenant with a noise of outrage, only to get hit a second time on the other cheek for his trouble. Ward then dragged his head up by the hair until Crowley couldn't hold back his high, helpless whimpers of pain as he struggled to support some of the weight with any other part of his body. "I wouldn't want to deny any of my shipmates their chance to make what little good of you they can," Ward said, in a warm, pleasant baritone that belied the actual meaning of his words, "so be thankful I'm not doing a fraction of what you deserve, you evil bitch." With that he slammed Crowley's head back against the mast and let him drop.

_Fuck,_ Crowley managed to articulate, just barely, in the timeless drowning vertigo before Ward picked up his legs and angled his body to drive into him as if actually trying to pierce a spear through the flesh and bone of him, and everything was just pain and screaming for a while.

Crowley, in a flickering unmoored corner of his mind, thought about hellfire.

The intellectuals in Hell's Unnatural Philosophy department — which, as far as Crowley understood from a laydemon's perspective, were to metaphysics as locking the world's largest bathhouse of Archimedeses in a room with a stick and telling them to tear down the gates of Heaven was to physics[7] — currently held that hellfire was the ultimate antithesis of Creation. The Sacred, they asserted, was that which most perfectly aligned with the Divine Will; this was why human souls which rejected Original Sin and practiced virtue, faith, love, and so forth were accepted into the Kingdom of Heaven, having proven themselves acceptable avatars of God's Creation. Demons, and humans who failed to rise above their base origins, had strayed from the divinity of their inception, and thus became Profane. Humans, having been granted free will and dominion over Creation, could (if they so chose) reshape _themselves_ to more closely conform with the shape of the Divine, and bring themselves back into the Almighty's favour. Demons, however, could no more rectify their imperfections than a tree, once grown crooked, could will itself straight, and so had been cast out beyond the borders of God's Creation into the primordial chaos of Hell.

Creation, and therefore Holiness, was Order given form by the Omnipotent Will. If demons had still been perfect, to be so utterly sundered from the Divine Will and cast into Chaos would have unmade them; but because they had become Profane, because they had already embraced that chaos, they could exist within it — become one with it — become _avatars_ of it.

The key to channeling hellfire was to allow oneself to be corrupted without being destroyed.

Crowley knew himself to be a rather weak demon. He knew who he was, and how far he was willing to go, which meant that he could handle hellfire fairly safely, insofar as the word "safe" could ever be applied to the pure manifestation of Destruction. But his specialty had always been fusion, not fission. At heart, he wasn't a destroyer. Demons like Beelzebub, Belial, Hastur — they could, and did, wield hellfire with abandon, descending fully into their worst selves, tearing apart Creation and those around them with an insatiable fervour. Crowley was enough of a bastard to damn people, to step on others to get ahead, to lash out in revenge, all those little acts of violence that bestowed just enough power to be addictive — he'd survived this long as a demon, after all — but there was only so much suffering he could bear without it destroying him.

He could make himself a conduit. He could call down hellfire, raze this ship and everyone on it, not merely murder but _obliterate_ every single person who'd hurt and raped and mocked him, who'd stood back and watched, who hadn't sacrificed pain and blood and _life_ for him—

And it would be, in a personal and figurative and therefore incontrovertibly metaphysically _real_ sense, suicide.

And it would hurt. It would hurt more, infinitely more, than the rough scrape of wood against the bloodied meat of his back, the knife-sharp press of fingers into the flesh of his thigh. Hellfire was the _essence_ of pain: to wield it was to embrace it, to want to hurt someone else so much you were willing to feed parts of yourself to the flame. There would be no escape that way, not until there was nothing left intact enough to suffer.

Crowley wasn't brave enough for that.

Ward took much longer to finish than Povey. When he finally did, he pulled out halfway through, painting Crowley's belly with seed before unceremoniously dropping his legs to the deck and letting him fall back against the mast. He didn't return to the encircling crowd immediately after tucking himself away and straightening his uniform, but drove his fist again and again into the same spot under Crowley's lungs until he felt the floating rib there give way with a searing crack.

"Right," he said with a thin smile of satisfaction as he rubbed his bruised knuckles, "who's next?"

It turned out to be Calhoun, who had taken Crowley's things and shredded his clothes in preparation for his whipping. Calhoun, who apparently had experience with this sort of thing — more so sex, in this case, rather than torture — seemed determined to go unbearably slowly and gently, rubbing circles over his napoleon[8] with the blood- and semen-slick pad of his thumb and licking and nipping his way along Crowley's neck until Crowley shuddered into a miserable facsimile of orgasm just to get it over with sooner. It didn't entirely work, but at least Calhoun seemed more willing to finish the job afterward, less focused on dragging pleasure out of Crowley by any means necessary — and it was about _dragging_ pleasure out of him, kicking and screaming if he had to, not about actual kindness or mercy, as if Crowley needed to see the victory in his eyes as he stepped away to tell.

Griffiths, the bosun, set his forearm against Crowley's throat and leaned his weight against it until Crowley submitted finally, gratefully to the inexorable pounding insistence of his human body, letting his eyes roll back and his head loll bonelessly forward and the creeping, seizing tendrils of darkness steal away his pain and leave him floating, distant and heavy, until the rest of the crew shouted Griffiths into letting up before he killed their precious dama-de-viaje, dragging Crowley harsh and sudden back into the burning light of consciousness as his traitorous vessel clawed glass-edged breaths through its bruised throat, nearly choking him again on the blood-soaked gag pressing against his soft palate. Lovell, the ship's master, took him hard and fast and savage enough to bruise where their hips impacted and his fingers dug into Crowley's pelvis and buttocks. Petty Officer Bowen did honestly seem to want to get through fucking Crowley as quickly and kindly as possible, but he didn't actually speak up or abstain, so he could get buggered with a flaming poker as well. Kasabyan, one of the midshipmen, was apparently inspired by Griffiths' performance and spent his entire turn digging his thumbs into Crowley's windpipe to listen to the thin wheeze of his breath as he struggled simultaneously to remind his panicking body that it didn't _need_ oxygen and still draw air past the merciless throttling grip around his neck, unable to simply stop altogether and spare his broken rib the aggravation under such careful scrutiny. When Kasabyan came, his hands tightened until all Crowley could hear was the wild thudding drumbeat of his pulse before the man finally let go and landed him another brutal slap for good measure.

The cheer that arose from his audience quickly descended into cacophony again as Kasabyan stepped away — sailors egging on their mates, hurling insults like stones, calling out suggestions that ranged from the implausible to the genuinely spine-chilling. "Take the bandage off," said one of them, "that way we can take her in two holes at once—"

"—wouldn't be able to bite with broken teeth—"

"—should have a go, Allen, 's the only way any woman would have you—"

"—barely a woman anyway—"

"—oughter be grateful someone's finally _making_ her one—"

"—not like she's good for anything else—"

"—crying like a little girl — how many people d'you think she's made do the same? About time she gets a turn, is what I say—"

"—think she's got enough of a blessed _heart_ to cry? Look at her eyes — there's nothing there, I'm telling you—"

"—unnatural—"

"—go on, Jenny, lovely little bight like that, how could anyone resist putting something in it—"

"That's right, why don't you show us how it's done, big brave man like yourself — bet _you're_ not too scared to put her in her place—"

The aura of frozen terror before him was enough to finally make Crowley look up, blinking futilely to bring his vision back into focus. Jensen had been shoved to the front of the group and was staring down at him, eyes wide in his ashen face. A tiny muscle twitched at the corner of his jaw.

_Oh, no,_ Crowley thought wretchedly, _don't make me feel bad for you now, you stupid bugger—_

He did, that was the problem. Jensen had killed a seventeen-year-old boy, and done everything in his power to abet the violence against Crowley, and bloodied his sword all across the Caribbean and the coasts of Europe, and was now about to attempt to rape him in front of all his brothers-in-arms; and Crowley felt sorry for him _anyway,_ because sodomy was a hanging offense and those very same brothers-in-arms thought it'd be _funny_ to prove their suspicions in full view of a captain who'd throw his best swordsman to a court-martial without a second thought.

And Crowley knew what it was like, because he'd _been_ there, he spent every day there — not literally having to decide whether to rape someone, thank Satan — but in an overarching sense, knowing it was either him or someone else and choosing self-preservation over sacrificing himself for a cause that would fizzle out like wet powder as soon as the Powers That Be found someone to replace him. You didn't get a choice. You did what you could to mitigate things, maybe, but you got on with the job, and tried to cope, and had your breakdowns somewhere private where no one who could hurt you would find out.

And maybe, if you were human, you enlisted in the hope that getting proper manliness beaten deep enough into your bones would make you stop wanting to kiss other boys and hold them like women, and you threw yourself into the noble art of violence because that was proper behaviour for men, and an outlet, and enough of a distraction to keep you a sword's-length away from temptation, and it at least allowed you to be around people you could never let yourself do more than touch.

Crowley had the out-of-place thought that he might, in fact, have to concede a point Aziraphale had made in one of their theological discussions around the eleventh century, when the angel had tried to posit that the worse a situation someone was in, the more opportunities they had to do good. 

"That's lunatic," Crowley had retorted at the time. "You can't judge a person stuck in a muddy shack in the middle of a battlefield by the same standards as someone living in a castle." But here, now: Crowley had observed it himself, hadn't he? This entire time, every time someone could have spoken up, could have disobeyed an order, could have shown mercy, could have stood against their own side in spite of the consequences…they hadn't, and Crowley had hated them for it, _still_ hated them for it — and rightfully so, because every single time, they'd had the choice to do good instead of evil, and it would have taken so much more courage and kindness and sacrifice than would ever be required of them without the creaking weight of social and institutional coercion hanging over their heads.

Crowley stood by the rest of his argument, though. Because it was fucking _unfair,_ and you had to be mad to somehow believe that was _justice._

Slowly, fumblingly, Jensen unbuckled his sword belt and passed it off to the Cain-in-arms beside him. His hands were shaking.

_You don't want to do this,_ Crowley told him, doing his best to claw together the fraying threads of his coherence through the exhaustion and the deep, inescapable agony. _But those bastards don't have to know, do they? You know what it's like to keep up a façade, make it look like you're whatever they want you to be._ He shifted his legs a little closer together despite the shock of pain that forced an involuntary whimper out of him, eyes locked meaningfully with Jensen's. _Remember Ward? Position this right, put up a good enough act, and no one will be able to tell the difference._

Tempting someone to deception and disobedience. That was appropriately demonic, surely.

Jensen took the space of a few breaths to collect himself, then unbuttoned his breeches, calling over his shoulder as he took himself in hand, "Surprised you need anyone to show you, Tozz, considering how many generous illustrations you've gotten by now. But I suppose I can do you a favour and try to go slow enough for you to pick something up."

Jensen proved to be fairly average in the penile department, fortunately, which meant that the breadth of his hand was sufficient to disguise most sins (or, in this case, lack thereof). Crowley dug his bloody fingernails into his numb palms, cringing despite himself — and despite the hurt that blazed molten along his nerves when the ill-advised movement pulled at his torn shoulder and livid back — because this was going to be awful, no matter how you cut it…

…because Jensen was right-handed, which meant that his left hand wrapped underneath Crowley's injured thigh to hoist it up to waist level so he could press their bodies together, flaccid prick nestled into the crease between Crowley's leg and groin as Crowley let himself scream and sob and carry on without restraint. Jensen avoided his gaze, concentrating with singular focus on arranging Crowley's other leg to cage their deception away from the eager eyes of their audience. He waited until Crowley's cries had subsided to laboured gasps, then began to thrust against him.

There was little science to it: Jensen's hips pressed tightly against his, so as to avoid any inconvenient slips; his body shielding them both; Jensen matching his grunts and sighs to Crowley's inarticulate moans. Obviously he'd never had the opportunity to gain more experience than the odd deniable handshake in the dark, but it didn't take much observation to figure out how this sort of thing went. Occasionally he changed up the angle, or the tempo, eliciting sharper sounds of protest and the approbation of his onlookers. After an apparently interminable enough period, his movements became more violent, less visibly controlled, and as he forced Crowley hard against the mast, Jensen whispered under his almighty wail, "Keep in mind that I could have made this _so_ much worse."

_Fair enough,_ Crowley acknowledged in a sort of disembodied blur as Jensen set his legs down with much more consideration than Ward and spat on him for the look of things. _Make sure the pirate doesn't rat you out to your evil fucking crewmates for not raping her. Common sense._

"That enough of a lesson for you, Tozz?" Jensen snapped, snatching his sword back with barely a glance.

The eponymous Tozz tipped his head in reluctant regard, then grinned the self-satisfied grin of one overcome with their own wit and who is not about to let anyone else miss out on it. "Knew you had it in you, Jenny." At the surrounding mirth, his grin widened. "And in her jenny."

Jensen replied with a rictus.

Tozz — Thompson, a fellow marine, who'd dishonoured more than a few girls already — paid for his hubris with the merciless attentions of his compatriots. Evidently feeling compelled to top Jensen's performance, and with a growing look of speculation at the utter lack of resistance Crowley proved capable of mustering when the malevolent little shit manipulated his dead right leg, Tozz hooked an elbow under his knee and raised his thigh up until it pressed flat against his chest and Crowley could barely see the ensuing smirk through the splotches of black streaking across his vision. Then the fucker folded his other leg up against his body as well, got both knees over his shoulders, and screwed Crowley like that until Crowley was pretty sure the only reason he stopped screaming was that his broken rib had pierced a lung.

"Oi, Gryphon!" Tozz called to the bosun as he pulled out and let Crowley's legs fall. "Borrow your knife?"

_Kill me,_ Crowley urged futilely as he returned, knife in hand, _kill me, just kill me already, I'm a pirate, I deserve it—_

Tozz didn't kill him. The sharp tip of the blade sliced only deep enough to draw blood, catching here and there on a patch of scale, until the word MOLLEY gleamed wine-dark across his chest.

_Oh, yes, very clever,_ Crowley thought with a sort of bitter hysteria. _Get in one last dig at us filthy deviants, because everyone knows the only difference between a woman in britches and a catamite is which hole they're hawking—_

The next rapist in line chose to build on the joke in the more high-concept form of a cock and balls carved just above the bandage around his thigh, evidently as a substitute for Crowley's tragic handicap. There was a joke in there somewhere about being a Fisher King of men, and collecting souls for hell with his cursed thigh wound, but Crowley couldn't quite articulate it.[9] Or any other words, really.

The next one cut BIGHT across his stomach.

_Why._

Crowley passed out when the next one dug his thumb into the spreading black bruise over his broken rib, and awoke screaming under yet another deluge of seawater igniting his wounds like a coalescing galaxy, almost voiceless by now between all the, you know, earlier screaming and the whistling wheeze of his punctured lung.

Stanton, marine sergeant: hard-faced, heavy-handed, pulled Crowley's hair back so hard that his spine arched so the man could suck bruises into his flesh and bite his neck and jaw bloody. When he finished, he ran his sword whisper-light along Crowley's jawline, pulling it away with a laugh when Crowley lunged forward to press into it, and cut off a dripping lock of hair as a trophy.

Warrington, gunner: nondescript man, _painfully_ descript cock, scratched long red weals into Crowley's arms and chest before carving along his cheekbone beneath his eye, in painstakingly precise letters that were (to the merriment of all) immediately blotted out of legibility by the blood, MONSTER.

Selby, midshipman: slid his fingers through the semen and blood dripping down Crowley's inner thighs, presuming that no one would notice a little surreptitious buggery amidst the mess. Crowley, whose cunt felt by now as if someone had fucked him vigorously with a cutlass and who was harbouring serious concerns that he might throw up and choke on the vomit if one more person put one more thing into it, spent a total of three milliseconds contemplating the likelihood that Selby would know or bother to prepare him adequately and simply shoved every memory he had of being hanged at him so vividly that Selby jerked his hand away as if burned. Contrary to all expectation, Crowley failed to throw up.

Farano, coxswain: held Crowley's thighs together and fucked the space between, which might have been slightly more tolerable given that Crowley blacked out through most of it, had Farano not then cut a cross into his other cheek while Crowley squeezed his eyes shut and trembled and prayed to anyone who might take his call — and he knew better, he _knew_ better, hadn't he seen practically every form of human idolatry imaginable? — that the wound would bleed red instead of black, because if someone as religious as Lobcock knew what consecrated objects could do to him—

And it was stupid, delirium and repeated head trauma were making him stupid, because _ex opere operato_ had never been more than a comforting fiction humans made up to rationalise away the awkward fact that sacrament had always and only been the province of genuine devotion to Heaven,[10] and ritual merely a means of focusing and amplifying what was already there. Even torturing a demon couldn't be holy if the intent was corrupt, right? Stood to reason.

It didn't burn any more than any of the other cuts on his body, at least.

Daly — the bosun's mate, who had already kissed Crowley so sweetly with the lash — detoured from his approach across the fifteen feet of deck between them to one of the shattered cannons by the ship's rail, which had been left where it was for the time being rather than divert the manpower necessary to shift it, where he brought his heel down hard against a section of the debris to knock it loose: a piece of metal about a foot long, Crowley saw when the man picked it up, a piece of axle or a bolt or something—

The temptation to set himself on fire was suddenly very, very hard to resist.

_This will end,_ Crowley repeated frantically to himself, _this will end, this will END—_

The burst of pain when it connected with his jaw was like watching his first supernova ignite, a flash of light so intense it almost rivalled the unshielded face of God as it flung entire constellations' worth of starstuff across the cosmos at a furious fraction of lightspeed. Every nerve in his crippled human body focused momentarily on the singular sensation of his jaw breaking, plunging him into the frozen darkness and silence of the deep, deep ocean floor.

"There," echoed Daly's voice through the roaring of waves as he tossed the piece of metal away, "now there's nothing left for you fainting flowers to be afraid of."

* * *

**Footnotes:**

[4] And possibly — if he ever happened to see them again — let them know that the buggery had, in the scheme of things, very little impact on their ultimate destination. [return to text]

[5] And then there were the cubi — incubi, succubi, concubi, whatever you wished to call them; the contemporary nomenclature was just Latin for _one who lies upon,_ or _beneath,_ or _with,_ depending on the demon's personal preference and choice of victim that day. They made Crowley uncomfortable in the same way Hastur and his shadowy other half did: demons who feasted so avidly on the rush of power wrought from other beings' suffering that they'd learned to take their cues from the most inventive nastiness the human mind could devise, the better to extract as much of it as possible at every opportunity. Crowley tried to avoid the lot of them when he could. The occasional assignments he'd been forced to work either on behalf of or alongside the Duke in Yellow still gave him squidgy, sickening feelings that lasted for days whenever he recalled them. [return to text]

[6] Unless you wanted it. Which some demons did. [return to text]

[7] Inimitably staffed, abysmally funded, irrepressibly passionate, and existentially terrifying. Given that Archimedes had developed some of the most advanced catapults and siege engines in human history, and was said to have claimed, "Give me a long enough lever and a fixed place to stand, and I shall move the world," it was probably best for everyone that his soul had managed in the end to slip through Hell's fingers. [return to text]

[8] Or, as the British papers referred to him at the time, "Little Boney". [return to text]

[9] Matthew 4:18-19, which introduces the earliest of Jesus's apostles and is generally interpreted as a metaphor for the salvation of human souls:

_And Jesus, walking by the Sea of Galilee, saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. "Come, follow Me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men."_

In Arthurian legend, the Fisher King — sometimes known as the Wounded King or Maimed King — is the last in a long line charged with keeping the Holy Grail. The details vary widely between authors, but he is always wounded in the leg or groin and incapable of standing, able only to fish in a small boat on the river near his castle while awaiting someone who can heal him by asking a certain question. (What the question actually _is_ again varies so greatly as to be seemingly inconsequential to the tale, but versions include "Why do you suffer so?" and "Who is served by the Grail?")

In most medieval stories, such a wound was commonly understood as a euphemism for the physical loss of or grave injury to one's penis. Since this was considered to rob a man of his dignity, most avoided acknowledging the actual nature of the wound out of politeness. The irony in this context is not unobserved. [return to text]

[10] Heaven itself,[11] not the cumulative and heavily-anthropomorphised character of YHWH from Abrahamic tradition. Contrary to centuries of immediate misinterpretation of the Gospels by Christian missionaries, knowledge of the precise word of scripture had very little to do with where one ended up when one died; otherwise Hell would be packed to bursting with nearly every human who had ever lived. [return to text]

[11] It would be another 200 years, give or take, before Crowley and Aziraphale managed to pick apart _that_ particular synecdoche. [return]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the Cthulhu mythos, Hastur is a deity of madness and degeneracy; the King in Yellow is said to be one of his avatars, a masked figure in a tattered yellow robe whose true face drives anyone who looks upon it insane. Given that Hastur is shown in canon to know Crowley personally, while Ligur does not, I've chosen to depict Crowley's impression of Ligur at this point in history as 'that other creepy duke Hastur's practically attached to at the hip'.
> 
> Be sure to check out the wonderful fanworks this chapter has spawned!  
> • A [comic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21307325/chapters/60628642) based on Crowley's contemplations of the afterlife by [ColorfulFlowersToo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ColorfulFlowersToo)  
> • A [Buzzfeed-style listicle](https://archiveofourown.org/comments/320399323) ranking the crew of the H.M.S. _Cygnus_ from least to most absolutely terrible by [unsmilingchuck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unsmilingchuck)


	3. Crawl 'Til Dawn

In the beginning, there was pain.

It was there long before consciousness, long before there was any awareness of it, or anything capable of being aware: just suffering, pure and unceasing and everywhere.

Darkness returned slowly. Time hadn't arrived yet; so there was simply nothing, for what could have been an eternity or could have been minutes, and either was the same thing.

Then Crowley thought, _oh._ And then, _I'm awake._

He struggled toward consciousness, knowing he had to reach it, but the darkness kept pulling him back under every time he neared the surface. Time still eluded his grasp, but the pain was everything, vibrating discordantly in the space between atoms, immanent and indescribable.

He thought he heard his name.

"—Antony—"

_"Captain—"_

Something he belatedly identified as despair pulled him deeper. _Let me rest,_ he thought. _Why does everyone keep needing me? I just want to go back to—_

_(Making things,_ he almost finished, but he couldn't think it.)

The pain was becoming more distinct, separating into identifiable sensations. Legs, he had those. They hurt. His back, too.

Everything, really, come to think of it.

Someone was crying. Multiple people. Voices, low, occasionally rising. The smell of bilgewater, lapping against his cheek, and of blood, and of tightly-packed human bodies with no facilities more sophisticated than a bucket.

Crowley breathed, and the pain burst into light, separating itself from the darkness and escaping high-pitched and plaintive through his throat. He curled instinctively inward to ease it, but that only made everything worse.

"Is he awake? _Captain—_ "

Everything between his legs hurt, as if his innards had been filled with lava. Someone had eventually gotten at his arse after all, Crowley noted. As well as his boots — he could feel his bare feet against the damp boards, shod in snakeskin belladonna-bright, burning like he'd trespassed on hallowed ground.

Had someone whipped his fucking _feet?_ Who the hell bastinadoed someone while they were unconscious?

(Wrong question. Hell wouldn't. That took humans — the kind of humans who needed only to see something different, something just ugly or weak or unfamiliar enough, to justify breaking it.)

Sounds kept coming out of him every time he moved or breathed. Crowley realised that was probably crying.

Chain clinked somewhere behind him. His wrists were no longer tied, he observed — someone had obtained a set of irons, and manacled his hands behind his back; he could feel the metal cold against his abraded skin and jutting bones. He vaguely recalled being cut down from the mast at some point and passed around, before splashing salt over his wounds had stopped working to revive him. The gag was gone, too. Crowley's mouth tasted like unwashed cock. He couldn't figure out if that was an improvement.

Right. There was a reason he'd needed to — something he needed to do.

Right.

Jaw first. It probably didn't hurt as much as setting it by hand, but the blinding scrape of bone shifting back into place was almost enough to make him pass out again. By the time he was done he was sobbing so hard he couldn't breathe, which reminded him that he needed to do something about that collapsed lung. His first full breath was such a revelation it made him cough, which made him scream a little amidst the crying, which wasn't exactly ideal but also wasn't really his biggest priority right now.

His remaining fingernails had grown long and needle-sharp at some point; easy enough to revert as he passed over them, as were the fingers he was pretty sure someone had carefully and pragmatically crushed beneath their bootheel as a similarly sensible precaution. Crowley's torn orifices were less simple a prospect. After contemplating various options (the idea of what undoing the damage would actually entail made him want to throw up again; repairing things was more the angel's purview) he finally just gave up on that whole stupid pretense at humanity and banished both them and every trace of spunk and other, less speakable bodily fluids on or inside him with a savage sense of relief. Not like anyone else would be able to tell without getting far more intimate than Crowley intended to allow any time soon, anyway.

Thigh. Shit. Couldn't really hurt any worse than it did already, he supposed.

Crowley ignited the bloody wad of linen tamponading the hole, absorbing the resultant pyrolytic energy and cauterising the damaged blood vessels the rest of the way in a single stroke. Credit to Hughes — with the law equally happy at the demon Antony's capture dead or alive, he'd at least made a token attempt to keep Crowley breathing long enough to make an example of, given the tools at his disposal on a wooden ship where fires tended to be obsessively contained. 

(He'd declined when offered a go at Crowley later on — more out of concern for hygiene and his own image than any real sense of altruism, given his utter indifference to Crowley's suffering.) 

Crowley breathed out, a little steadier now. It was nowhere near as good as true hellfire — a bit like coffee to a cocaine addict — but it was something.

More carefully, he let the fire sink deeper, killing the nerves around the wound until his relentless sobbing slowed, then informed the rent flesh with the grim implacability of a being with nothing to lose that it Would Hold Together if it didn't want to discover the consequences of failure. The rest of his horrific assemblage of lacerations bolted to attention and did their best to follow suit out of sheer intimidation by proximity.

Crowley was a bit shocked that no one had gone after his eyes beyond the blood-encrusted cuts on his face, given these bastards' propensity for making a trophy of him and their continual focus on his inhumanity. Thank the Powers of Hell and human nature for the deterrent effect of superstition, he supposed.

There was someone watching him.

Crowley turned swiftly and was brought up short by the chain at his wrists. Twisting his head around, he discovered that he'd been manacled to one of the vertical support beams. He almost started laughing at the sheer absurdity of chaining up a dying pirate, as if he was so fearsome that he might somehow drag himself out of the hold on two functioning limbs and a collapsed lung to slaughter all the good upstanding servants of the Crown while they slept, except that he knew if he started he wouldn't be able to stop until he broke down completely, and this was neither the time nor the place for it.

The pirates in the nearby cells[12] fell silent at the dim foxfire glimmer of a safety lantern being unshielded. The figure on the ladder up to the next deck was…small. Small enough to have escaped Crowley's notice in the midst of

(not right now, think about it _later)_

everything else, and working very hard to make itself even smaller, if that was possible. And…

Ah.

Crowley shuffled around to face it as best he could, started to speak, coughed horribly, healed the worst of the damage to his throat, and rasped, "And what should I call you?"

A pause; then a tremulous prepubescent soprano answered, "Davies."

"Davies," repeated Crowley, slowly and gently. "And what are you doing here, Davies?"

"I—" Probably only Crowley could see, in the thick darkness, the child's eyes darting nervously between him and his crew, gathering the courage to step over an irrevocable line — not a line in the sand, but a fissure, a cliff's-edge, with nothing but the hope of a soft landing at the bottom; an event horizon. "I saw — what everyone did—"

Davies stuttered into silence. After a moment, Crowley gave the smallest of pushes.

"I can't do this anymore," Davies whispered, sounding near tears. "I-I'm…" The kid swallowed, faced forward unto the breach, and went on, "I'm like you, and after — what they'll do to someone just for having a bight—"

"Why do people keep using that word?" Crowley interrupted, more crossly than he intended. Concussions felt a lot like being drunk, it turned out, except bad.

Davies' mouth snapped shut. When no one else said anything, Theek — Crowley's first mate, who had come originally from Annam by way of the East India company, to the _Apophis_ on the first independent merchant ship they'd captured, and to womanhood a year later, and who was by now well-accustomed to managing her captain's near-total absence of nautical background — explained kindly, "It's another name for a cunt splice, Captain."

"Oh," said Crowley stupidly. _Bloody_ Lobcock. Of course he wouldn't countenance a shipful of sailors swearing like ones. "So you thought you'd, what, put on a pair of britches and run off to join the Navy, and you signed on with _Lobcock?"_ he asked instead of any of the dozens of other, more important questions fighting for control of his mouth.

"I didn't know what he was like!" Davies' voice broke. "We needed the money and I didn't know what else to do, me mam was already working all hours — I mean, she has to, there's no one else…"

"Your mam — she's a widow, yeah?" Crowley suggested quietly.

Davies nodded, accepting the euphemism gratefully. 

"Davies would be your da's name, then." Crowley did his best to keep his voice soft and even, as if reassuring a spooked animal.[13]

An infinitesimal hesitation; then Davies nodded again. "It's just me and her, so I thought I could — I could at least send back some of my pay, and I swear I din't know what the Captain's like, he'll have a person whipped for any little thing—"

Which meant, for boys in the Navy, getting bent over and caned an equal number of strokes on the bare bottom like schoolchildren instead. "How have you kept from getting caught yet?" Crowley asked, torn between incredulity and awe.

"This was my first voyage, and I din't — I didn't _know_ that the Captain was, that he was like this, and I have to wake up before everyone else everyday and do everything perfect _all the time,_ and I'm his favourite right now but I can't keep it up, I _can't—"_

"Shhh. All right. It's all right," he told the kid. "I'm not angry at you. I'm sorry I raised my voice. Go on."

"I, I thought," Davies quavered, voice somehow even smaller than before, "I — I volunteered for the midnight watch, there aren't enough crew for both ships for anyone else to be on deck right now, and there are boats, and I thought — if I got you out, you could take me with you."

"Leaving your watch post's a flogging offense," Crowley pointed out neutrally. Davies had crossed that line as soon as the kid had come down here.

Davies bit their lip and managed another jerky nod, a stray tear catching the lantern's light as it crept down their cheek.

Crowley closed his eyes. Why couldn't people stop _needing_ him?

"Well," Crowley said when he felt like he could control his voice again, "I'm not leaving my crew behind." 

Davies' face didn't so much fall as plummet, shattering into a thousand razor-edged shards upon landing, each unkind cut exposing every doomed impediment — each opportunity for stealth erased; for safety quashed; for sympathy denied; for hope destroyed.

"Here's what's going to happen," Crowley told the kid, as gentle and unyielding as the tide. "The only authority pirates respect is our own, which means that whenever we capture a ship, it's the crew's decision whether we kill our captives or let them live. If my crew decides to spare them, the captives get to choose whether they want to be set free in exchange for a ransom, join up with us, or stand on their honour and die anyway. If you set me free, I am going to set _them_ free. And we're very protective of each other, so I doubt they're going to choose mercy. That'll be on you."

"Captain—" Theek hissed urgently.

"It's all right, Theek. Davies. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

Davies stared at him wide-eyed, as if hypnotised. "Why are you telling me this?" they whispered.

"Because it's your choice," said Crowley, chained naked and bloody to the belly of his own ship, never blinking or breaking eye contact through the grasping shadows. "Because it has to be a choice, and you have to know what you're choosing. Now — you could try to convince my crew that some of your people are worth saving. They'll hear you out, and decide whether they agree. Either way, I know some people who could help you and any friends we might decide to bring along.

"Or…" Crowley made a vague equivocal noise. "You could go back to your post, and no one would ever find out that you left it. You could take one of the ship's boats and go it alone, though at three days out, I wouldn't say much for your chances, so it'd probably be a better idea to desert as soon as you get back to port — change into a set of skirts, and I doubt anyone would ever find you. You'd have to find your own passage back home, though." Crowley's eyes finally left Davies' face as he tipped his head indicatively. "Or you could accidentally drop that knife you have on your belt there. Who knows what kinds of things a godless pirate might be able to do with something like that?"

Davies' eyes flickered down and back up, anguished. "Does that mean you'd kill yourself?"

"Only if I can't pick the lock on these manacles," Crowley answered honestly.

And that was the linchpin: give someone a way to fob off responsibility for their actions, and they suddenly became capable of so much more than if they'd had to bloody their hands themselves. Davies descended the last few steps down the ladder to free up the hand not holding the lantern, drew the folding knife clipped to their belt — which should have been invisible under their uniform jacket, to anyone using merely their eyes — clutched it tightly for a minute, then said, "I have the key. If you need it. I lifted it off Stanners on my way here," and tossed the knife toward where Crowley lay.

It skittered to a stop just past his head, where as soon as Crowley laboriously pushed himself back toward his original position he could easily reach it with his bound hands. Crowley had never actually needed to learn how to pick a lock — had never, in fact, needed even a key, save for certain supernatural barriers impassable without one — and therefore simply rattled his chains for effect for a minute or two before they realised abruptly that they would rather not get in his way after all.

He glanced at his caged crew — and, yes, there they were, his brilliant, creative humans: not a single one still tied up by now after they'd all been shoved in with each other as hastily as possible, each one loaded down with an uncountable variety of interesting sharp things and other useful implements; most likely it was Eel they could thank for that, insouciantly dislocating his thumbs to wriggle free as soon as there were no eyes on him — considered the impossibility that they hadn't already done their utmost to pick the locks that Crowley had, in retrospect, unwisely miracled unpickable, and rather than face the guilt of instantly revealing his part in their prolonged imprisonment and his own prolonged torment, turned back to Davies and said, "I'm going to overpower you for those keys now."

Wordlessly, Davies held out a heavy iron keyring.

Crowley pushed (or, rather, dragged, making extensive use of the nearby cell bars) himself to his feet, staggered when his right leg nearly gave out, glared meaningfully at it, and limped over to snatch the keys and, as an afterthought, the lantern from Davies' unsteady grip. He sagged against the bars as he searched for the right key, resting his head against the nearest as he mumbled, "Hi, guys. Missed you. Hold this for me?"

Eel reached out to take the proffered lantern. "Satan's fucking balls, James," said Theek, who Crowley could now see was missing her left arm below the elbow. "You look like shit."

"Really?" Crowley gave her a slightly manic grin as he slotted the key into place, indescribably grateful for the sheer normalcy of the exchange for reasons he didn't really want to examine at the moment. "I figure if I work it right, we could make it the latest fashion."

Theek's answering grin was more than slightly predatory. "Isaac," she ordered as the door swung open, turning to the only crewman present who was taller even than Crowley, "the captain needs a coat."

"No," said Asif even as Isaac Freedman started to pull his coat off, still horribly expressionless. "He needs something that won't lie against his back. Esmée, your robe. Do you need help taking it off?"

"If someone would," she responded, no less indomitably regal for all the pain and rage brimming over the edges of each graceful Haitian vowel. James Moore[14] helped her away from the wall she'd leant against to take the weight off her blood-burgundy calf and supported her by the arm as together they worked her free of her outermost layer.

It was Damascus silk, a brilliant deep bronze and smooth as water but for the blood-stiffened rent at the bottom. Crowley shrugged into it awkwardly, back-to-front. "Belt?" he asked, and had a threadbare-soft sash pressed into his hand almost before the word was all the way out of his mouth.

As Theek commandeered the keys and limped purposefully to the next cell, Crowley caught Ayo in the current of bodies flowing through and tipped her head to more closely examine the purple-black swelling that had overtaken the left side of her face. "Oh, Ayo, my knight in flying colours," he murmured, for she emblazoned herself in the same bloody crimson of no quarter that adorned Crowley's usual night-dark garb, in defiant honour of the home and culture she'd been so mercilessly ripped from,[15] "what did they do to you, lovely?"

"I set her jaw back into joint," Asif said quietly, "but she'll have to wear that sling to keep it in place until it heals enough for her to eat and speak again, and there may be hairline fractures I can't do anything about."

There were, but as Crowley brushed his fingers over her bruises with the barest of touches, they closed, taking a portion of the pain with them. Ayo closed her eyes and took a shaky breath. "You did the best you could," Crowley replied. "Both of you. I should have been able to do more."

Ayo shook her head fiercely, eyes glittering diamond-bright with unfallen tears, and indicated efficiently but unambiguously that Crowley's responsibility for what was or would soon come to be was immaterial.

Crowley cupped her uninjured cheek and carefully, gently leaned his forehead against hers. "Good girl," he managed, throat closing up at the lie nestled, viper-like, beneath the words.

"And what do you think you could have done, Captain?" asked Asif once she'd moved away, still in that low, private tone. "Most people wouldn't be able to stand for at least a week after a lashing like you endured."

Crowley opened and closed his mouth several times before stammering, "Some— I mean. Something. Fought back more, or. I don't know. 'S not like they were really very competent, were they? It was just bad luck that they were able to use me against you all."

"Yes. Impaled through both the quadriceps and hamstring — most people wouldn't be able to stand at all, not without a very long convalescence and a cane."

Crowley stared at Asif, who stared back, calm and steady as always, and felt that awful sensation of guilt twist in his gut like a living thing, threatening to choke him. "Look," Crowley admitted finally, forcing each word out as if he had to physically drag it up through his throat, "I've…sort of…been lying. About certain things. To all of you."

"I know," said Asif.

"You what," said Crowley intelligently.

"I know," repeated Asif. "Ichthyosis of the skin is rare, though not unheard-of, but I've never read about a case that spread spontaneously. Cat-eye deformities of the pupil similarly appear in a few places in medical literature, but symmetrical cases are even rarer, and don't cause yellowing or irregular expansion of the iris; and you don't present any other signs of jaundice. Ever since the mutiny, up until now, neither you nor any other member of this crew have suffered more than superficial injuries, nor infection or sepsis. I'm not sure you realise how ineradicable a plague sepsis is in this profession, Captain." At Crowley's slack-jawed expression, Asif's mouth ticked up into a small, crooked smile. "Not to mention that you can see perfectly in the dark, fly a serpent flag, attack other ships for their gold, and went so far as to propose naming your own vessel after yourself. You're not subtle, my friend."

Crowley considered correcting him — _really_ considered, almost got the words out — and, like the coward he knew himself at heart to be, fled for refuge in the pretense Asif had handed him and instead asked, "How long?"

"Well," said Asif, the other corner of his mouth rising infinitesimally to join the first, "I started to suspect when you changed sexes later the same year."

"You weren't supposed to remember that," said Crowley.

"I did wonder if I'd somehow been mistaken, at first," Asif confessed. "I thought you might simply have been so practiced at passing for male that you'd successfully led us to believe your anatomy matched the rest of your appearance. But when all the other evidence continued to accumulate, I found myself forced to revisit my preconceptions."

Crowley found himself staring at the medic again: a small, dark, trim man, disarmingly delicate in appearance with his bifocals and thin, precise fingers folded neatly together, belying the underlying strength that could drag someone twice his mass to safety under heavy fire; endlessly meticulous, relentlessly rational, impossible to shock or unsettle, and apparently _a literal bloody clairvoyant._

"You never said anything," he accused, lost for any other response.

Asif shrugged. "Neither did you. I assumed you had your reasons for keeping silent, so I considered it best not to meddle."

"Does anyone else know?" Crowley asked, more quietly.

"Most of them suspect on some level, I believe. They consider you a good-luck charm." Unexpectedly, Asif added, "I'm sorry."

"For _what?"_

"In the _Book of Overthrowing Apophis_ and Egyptian creation papyri, the rites to neutralise your power involve stabbing, crushing, and burning. I should have made you a priority as soon as I saw you fall."

"I — what — _no,"_ said Crowley. "I mean — it wasn't — I mean, it _was_ the stabbing, mostly, but that's not — how do you even _know_ all this?"

"My mother is Egyptian, and I studied at Edinburgh. I took an interest in the classical literature."

"You…studied classics and medicine…at one of Britain's premier universities," Crowley echoed. "And you, you took up as a _Navy sawbones_ instead of lecturing in some posh operating theatre or something?" He'd known the man was educated, but this rather exceeded his admittedly not-all-that-deeply-thought-out expectations.

"My mother is Egyptian," Asif pointed out again, his smile now dryer, more self-deprecating.

"Right, yeah, the colonialism thing, sorry." Crowley scrubbed a hand over his face. "I got hit in the head a few times. Forgot England was kind of shit for a second there."

A touch of concern entered Asif's expression. "Eel, I need that lantern over here for a moment." Lantern in hand, he raised it to Crowley's eye level, studying his pupils as he moved it to one side and then the other. Finally he shook his head in frustration. "I truly cannot tell if you have a concussion."

"If it helps, I feel like I do," Crowley offered, somewhat more candidly than usual.

Asif sighed. "I suppose that's the best we can do. Try not to engage in strenuous activity or sleep within the next twelve hours, if at all possible." Lowering his voice again, Asif asked, "Is there anything I can do for you in a professional capacity?"

"I…have no idea," Crowley admitted. "I just needed enough time to think straight, mostly. And, er, twelve hours, I guess."

"Noted. Is there anything I can do in the capacity of a friend?"

Crowley looked at him for a long time before he managed to form the words, "I don't think I can really talk about it right now."

Asif gave him that unhappy, compassionate smile. "Let me know if that changes. In the meantime, I have other survivors I must tend to."

"Right, yeah, do that." Theek had returned and was waiting, not obtrusively but still unignorably, for Crowley's attention. "How are we?" he asked her.

"We've made up pallets out of the storage crates and spare sailcloth for the worst casualties," she reported. "Altogether, we have forty-three able to fight. We'll need to do this quick and quiet. And you, Captain?"

"And me what?"

"How are you?" Theek elaborated, more slowly and clearly, evidently having overheard the part of the conversation where Crowley'd gotten hit in the head.

"Uh. Bad." Crowley winced at Theek's expression. "I mean. I'm alive and mostly upright, so. Could be worse?"

Theek's expression now stated, with silent eloquence, that she doubted that. Given the amount of blood, and what all of them had seen prior to their forcible relocation to the brig, Crowley couldn't really fault her.

Behind him, Davies had gradually backed away from the increasingly undeniable reality of the freed pirates until the kid's back was pressed up against the ladder with one hand clutching a rung, primed to flee. Crowley turned, aware that he cut a significantly more intimidating figure at full height, cast in sharp silhouette, than curled up naked and helpless on the floor. "No one could reasonably expect you to stop us," he remarked. "You can stay out of our way, or try to resist and be made a hostage. Either way, if there's anyone in your crew you think's worth sparing, now's the time to say so."

Davies wet their lips nervously, hand tightening on the rung of the ladder. "Jensen," the kid said, nearly inaudibly, then repeated with marginally greater strength, "Matthew Jensen, back on the _Cygnus._ He's one of the lob— the red marines, sort of tall, with kind of gingery brown hair — he…I think he twigged me, one time when I was changing, but he didn't say anything, and he couldn't have told anyone, or — so I-I think he might be…like us." Davies held Crowley's gaze, pleading.

"If it makes a difference," said Crowley to his crew, as neutrally as possible, "he abstained." He didn't say from what. No one had said it out loud yet, though it was easy enough to guess — the stripping, the disparagement and abuse, Lobcock's…everything, some of their own familiarity with the experience; Crowley couldn't guess how much they'd all heard from two decks below, or what they'd seen when he'd finally been dragged down here to be chained up and left for dead, but he'd been pretty well covered in evidence. Some dark, squirming part of Crowley's soul was pathetically relieved that nobody was forcing him to deal with their feelings about the matter as of yet, other than the unanimous heat-haze of murderous intent rippling off the gathered brigands so thickly even an average human would be able to taste it, which was at least flattering.

As the whispers spread through the crowd in hushed conference, Crowley asked, knowing that Davies would think he'd lied on the kid's behalf but unable to bring himself to care, "Anyone else?" When Davies hesitated, he added, "No one's going to reject you out of hand for asking too much. You can always kill a person later, but you can't bring back someone who didn't deserve it." In most cases, at least.

"Jensen will get a choice," Theek reported back as the silence stretched taut. "What he does with it is up to him."

Crowley clasped her shoulder in tacit gratitude, gingerly, to avoid aggravating any potential injuries. "Anyone else who was decent to you?" he suggested to Davies. "Any other kids?"

"There's…there's Bianchi," Davies said reluctantly. "He's fourteen. But he's already as bad as the rest of them."

Behind the words Crowley could hear months of bullying, cruel pranks, vile put-downs disguised as jokes, bucking eagerly for the approval of hateful men—

(the callous fervour of youth invited to join in men's games, to throw aside the last regrettable vestiges of immaturity for the bragging rights, to become One Of The Fellows, _come on, Giorgie, she won't bite)_

—and nearly said _Then he can go to Hell with the rest of them,_ by the Enemy's own laws he was a year and past old enough to be held accountable for his actions, if the Almighty wanted to suffer little children then _let_ them come, fourteen years was more of a chance than _we_ ever—

—before something in him seized at the thought of forever damning someone for wanting to please what he thought were the right people.

He was shaking, breathing hard, Crowley realised, when he turned to Theek to find her already staring back at him expectantly. The crew knew that he didn't like killing kids if it could be avoided, that he didn't think it was fair to judge someone irrevocably for what they weren't yet capable of understanding, blurry as that line might often be. Theek's expression changed when Crowley's eyes met hers, to something softer, more alarmed; and she brought her hand up to turn him away from Davies, stopping an inch from making contact, as if repelled by an impervious magnetic field; and murmured under her breath, once Crowley caught the hint and obligingly shielded their conversation from their impressionable observer, "It's your choice, Captain."

"Did you all already—"

"He lives if you say he lives."

"No," said Crowley, too quickly. "I can't — conflict of interest." This was supposed to be a trap, had always been a trap: slaughter a shipful of sleeping men, or let them live to continue carving their bloody path across the world? A simple, straightforward double bind. Crowley wasn't supposed to be the one suddenly caught in it. A sin, or a virtue, only counted if someone chose it; anything Crowley himself did was pure self-indulgence, a waste of demonic opportunity — excusable enough for the small things, but for this? He didn't make moral judgements, just set them up; who was he to judge, when only God truly knew what the rules were? How was _he_ supposed to tell which evil would be weighed the lesser in the final balance? How was he supposed to tell whether killing the boy would be deemed a violation of the sixth commandment or just punishment for his crimes, whether sparing him was an act of grace or of criminal negligence? Crowley knew who he was, and _who he was_ was a shadow on the soul of every human he came into contact with, an architect of slippery slopes; how was he supposed to have suffered another's act of sin, knowingly drawn them deeper toward the clutches of Hell, and then absolve them of the consequences just because some meticulously scabbed-over wound in his heart, laid bare and bleeding, flinched at taking away any conceivable hope of a second chance?

How was he supposed to trust his own judgement, when the rest of him was howling so frantically for vengeance that he could barely keep himself fully human?

"James," said Asif gently, pulling him back to reality, "it is in part your interest that this concerns."

Crowley shook his head in desperation. "I don't have the authority."

"You're our _captain,"_ James Moore pointed out.

_"By election!"_

"James," Theek cut him off. "Is the chit right? _Was_ he as bad as the rest of them?"

"I don't remember," Crowley whispered helplessly. It was barely even a lie: he'd blacked out again at some point shortly after that, and couldn't even be entirely sure what the whelp had done.

Theek let out a long breath, then turned back to Davies. "You," she said. "Davies. Do you _want_ us to spare Bianchi's life?"

After a long, painful pause, Davies shook their head.

"Then he dies," Theek said bluntly. "Captain," she whispered to Crowley before proceeding, "you should stay behind. Let Asif treat your wounds. Our hostage can identify the one man worth a damn in this nest of scorpions."

"No," said Crowley before he even realised he'd opened his mouth: a whipcrack snarl of a word, raw and hoarse and echoing with strange harmonics.

"You can _barely stand,"_ Theek hissed.

"James." Asif was watching him very closely, more closely than Crowley had ever before noticed. "Would you permit someone to touch you? To support you, if necessary?"

Crowley swallowed a hysterical giggle, lest Theek become even more convinced than she was already that he was in no fit state to do anything more than sit quietly in the dark and be tended to like something damaged, something broken. What harm could it do? He was a bloody _demon._ This wasn't Hell, where any sign of vulnerability invited a feeding frenzy as inevitably as blood in the water. No one here was going to hurt him, and even if by some wild stretch of the imagination they felt the urge to, he could fill them with fire and venom before they had the chance to blink.

He schooled his face into an expression he hoped looked appropriately serious and sane, and nodded.

Theek rounded on the doctor. "I cannot believe you are supporting this chết tiệt—"

"Theek," Asif said. Nothing more; merely cast his gaze over the gathered crew, landing with brief yet unerring accuracy upon those clutching the hilts of their weapons too hard, those staring at nothing or far too intensely at the little tête-à-tête between their leadership, then returned it to her.

Theek closed her eyes for a moment, and for the span of that moment only, the age and pain and weariness that she had so diligently kept under lock and key showed in all its unforgiving depth on her face before she opened her eyes and became once again the demon Antony's staunch right hand, relentless and unwavering. "Oi," she called, raising her voice just enough to be heard over the sounds of many people breathing and shifting, "Row. Get over here and keep your stubborn cuss of a captain from keeling over half-dead. We'll be sending these sons of bitches straight to their places at the Devil's table, and I don't want Him coming up here thinking it's time to collect."

The crowd parted to let through Ronan Bowe, a stout, simple man who had been with the _Apophis_ from the beginning and who loved nothing on Earth but sailing — but that more than anyone or anything that ever lived — and who therefore was inevitably and universally known as Rowboat. Not being much of a fighter, and living practically gull-like amid the rigging, he had escaped more than the general assortment of bumps and bruises acquired during their capture. He gave Crowley an uncertain smile upon reaching him, torn between the basic social niceties impressed upon him over a lifetime of impassioned repetition and dismay at his captain's bloody and bedraggled appearance, looking anxiously between his superiors and Asif for instruction.

"Right side, there's a lad," Crowley told him patiently. That was at least one thing to recommend the fraught crusade against the hand sinister — aside from his lame right leg and pretty much symmetrically-flayed back, most of the serious damage he'd accumulated had been to the other side of his body,[16] making it relatively easy to use Row as a crutch without putting too much pressure on anything he was holding together mainly with miracles and sheer willpower. The man obediently took his place at Crowley's side — Crowley ruthlessly buried the instinct to flinch at the impending contact — and when he dithered over how to hold him up without touching the bloodied mess of his back or anywhere else potentially sensitive, Crowley added, "Just let me lean on you. There we go. Thank you.

"Davies," he addressed his young rescuer, "you'll want to stick by me. Stay out of everyone's way until we get to the _Cygnus,_ yeah?"

Davies, evidently interpreting this as either an order or a threat — which, in fairness, it wasn't _not_ — sidled away from the ladder to hastily cross the few feet of space to the cell bars against which Crowley was still leaning, fetching up half-behind him, keeping his body as a barrier between the child's own and the massed pirates. Crowley twisted to look at the kid, only realising when Davies' eyes widened somehow further that human spines probably weren't expected to work like that, and in the same moment decided he didn't particularly give a damn. "Is there a first name you prefer?" he asked as his crew began to stream purposefully past them to the next deck. "You can be anything you want to, when you're with pirates. We've got women, and men who used to be women and women who used to be men, and—" he raised his voice a bit — "is Martin or Matilda here?"

A sun-browned arm waved weakly in the dim grey shadows at the back of the hold, where Asif had lit more lanterns to better illuminate the improvised pallets for the worst-injured. "Here, Cap'n."

"Which one are you right now?" Crowley asked, for the benefit of those present who lacked the ability to see into others' minds.

"Matilda, Cap'n."

"You can be both," Crowley told Davies. "One at a time or all together, or neither, or something else entirely. As I said, the only rules pirates obey are our own. And no one'll nettle you if you change your mind later."

After a very long pause, in a very small voice, the kid replied, "Just Davies, please."

"All right," Crowley agreed. Sticking with the lad's chosen identity until and unless he decided differently, then.

As Crowley nudged Rowboat in the direction of the ladder, Davies asked unexpectedly, "Does that mean you're a man, then? When you're with pirates?"

Crowley bestowed upon him a sabre-edged grin, which he managed at the last second to keep from faltering when he realised he'd forgotten to check for fangs. Everything hurt enough that he couldn't tell by feel, and he'd been far too preoccupied to rein in the whole hissing thing regardless — was it bright enough in this part of the hold that they'd show, to human eyes?

Whatever. _Whatever._ What did it matter? It wasn't like everyone hadn't already seen enough to completely shatter any illusion of normality anyhow.

"Something else entirely," Crowley said, aiming for nonchalance. "But close enough to get by as one when I want to."

He could sense Davies thinking. Feeling strangely guilty again, and unsure whether it was because he was letting down the side or letting down the kid, Crowley added, "There are people like us everywhere, not just outside of civilised society. You just have to be careful and know what you can get away with. But that's not much different from living as a woman anyhow, innit?"

* * *

**Footnotes:**

[12] Generally speaking, because space was at a premium on most ships of this period, only the largest — of which the _Apophis_ , a three-deck American-style frigate captured by Britain during the War of 1812, was not — would have dedicated compartments to contain prisoners. However, Crowley expected any half-decent military ship to have cells on the lowermost deck, and so the _Apophis_ did, much to the puzzlement of her original captain and crew. [return to text]

[13] Not something he'd ever been good at. Animals, which didn't bother with such silliness as "common sense" or "rational thought", tended to be far more likely than humans to notice something was amiss — a faint scent of fire, perhaps, or the way he moved, not quite perfectly human. Everywhere Crowley went, cats spat and arched their backs, dogs raised their hackles, and horses readied themselves to kick anyone who came too close, as if Creation itself recognised the aberration in its midst and was unconsciously trying to expel it. It had put him quite off of the idea of the natural world for the most part. One of humanity's best qualities, Crowley opined, was coming up with ways to interact with animals as little as possible on a day-to-day basis. [return to text]

[14] Invariably full-named, being the Other James. [return to text]

[15] These were not, strictly speaking, Crowley's colours. Reds were associated with Ogun, the Yoruba deity of blood and iron; with heat and flame, passion and rage. Blacks were of the earth and its darknesses, and of Eshu, trickster-emissary of crossroads, which Christian missionaries had syncretised, as is their wont, with the Devil. [return to text]

[16] Which his assailants had then fucking laid him on, though whether by coincidence or cruelty Crowley had been too athwart to tell. It had probably saved his life — if one considered that a desirable outcome — by giving his single functioning lung room to expand, but had done neither his multiple fractures nor his torn shoulder any favours. [return to text]

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Theek is from Vietnam, which was called Annam until the 20th century. Her name would correctly be spelled Tuyết; her fellow crew members, however, have varying accents and levels of literacy, so she goes by the approximate consensus pronunciation.


	4. What the Water Couldn't Take From Us

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hypotheses I've confirmed while writing, editing, and posting this fic:
> 
> 1\. I am, in fact, capable of writing an entire longform project serially, even if I didn't intend to when I started.
> 
> 2\. The continuous support and feedback of my audience makes all the difference in my ability to carry a project through to the very end. Thank you all for your comments and kudos; I hope I can continue to exceed your expectations as we move into the final stretch of this story, and reply directly to more of you as my health and energy permit.
> 
> 3\. The perversity of the universe tends toward a maximum.
> 
> I started posting this fic on a regular update schedule because I was nearly finished with it — all that remained was the denouement and final edits. Since the first chapter went up a little over a month ago, I've worked out via a great deal of trial and error what I'm capable of, at what pace, and how to manage my workload for best effect so I could maintain that schedule as well as my writing progress.
> 
> Then the Social Security Administration sent me a letter at 4:30 PM on a Thursday informing me that I needed to justify my continued existence in excruciating detail by the beginning of the next week, or my disability application would be denied.
> 
> After five days spent writing an adderall-fuelled 17,000-word dissertation on my trauma, I did manage to mail it off on time, but every other facet of my life was fucked up beyond all recognition. Once the last dose of stimulants wore off, I slept for a week. That was this past week. I'm still recovering.
> 
> All this is to say: I don't know when the final two chapters will be ready to post. They're fully outlined — this entire fic has been from the start, which I am aware makes it _very amusing_ that I thought it was going to be a mere 3000-word side project that would be done by February — so you may rest assured that they will indeed be completed and posted unless I die unexpectedly in the interim, but I'm not going to push myself. Please enjoy the following chapter and be sure to check out the work of those that have contributed to this fic, without whom it would not have been a fraction as good.
> 
> **Update November 1, 2020:** Chapter 5 is still on its way, and is turning out to be by far the longest chapter yet. I don't know what I was expecting.
> 
> ...Other than perhaps that I might have begun to recover even slightly at some point in the _past three FUCKING months._ While I have you all captive to my anti-authoritarian propaganda, allow me to remind you that gatekeeping marginalised populations from accessing institutional safety nets is a form of eugenic genocide by design, and that equating worth with productivity is meant to keep you too stressed and exhausted meeting even your most basic needs to live a full life or effect meaningful change. Take care of yourselves if you can; if you have the time, energy, and mental space to spare for more than that, try to take care of each other.
> 
> **Update January 1, 2021:** I have finally started to recover, and the upcoming chapter has surpassed 13k words. In the process, I've been working on several companion entries to this series that are nearing completion as well — if you're subscribed to this fic but not to series or author updates, allow me to humbly recommend it.

By the time Row and Crowley managed the complex and painful process of getting the latter up to the berthing deck — which ultimately involved Row rigging an improvised pulley-and-sling to support Crowley's weight enough for him to climb the ladder without falling off — the majority of the slaughter was already over. Quick and quiet the pirates went indeed, as each assassin with two functioning hands clamped one over their victim's mouth and slashed his throat through the windpipe before he had the chance to cry out, then held him in place until his struggles ceased before moving inexorably on to the next; while those like Theek who had only one worked in pairs, as practiced and familiar as when the crew manoeuvred the _Apophis_ as one body comprising a hundred individual organisms. Davies blanched as his head rose up through the hatchway, freezing in place at the sight of the deck running dark with the blood of his former shipmates, and at the foul stench of death that pervaded the enclosed space as each corpse went wholly limp in its hammock, limbs splayed loosely akimbo over the sides.

"If you're going to cat up," said Crowley, quite casually for all his own paleness and the intensity of his grip around Rowboat's shoulders, "at least try to do it up here; the hold's already bad enough."

Davies swallowed several times in succession before he was able to open his mouth to respond, "I won't."

Crowley turned his head to regard the boy thoughtfully. "Regretting your decision at all?"

Davies took a deep breath in spite of the fetid air, then shook his head, hoisting himself the rest of the way up the ladder.

At the far end of the deck, Crowley's crew was finishing off the last of the Navy tars, swift and vicious. Theek strode between the sea of creaking hammocks back to where the three of them stood. "No-one saw the Lieutenant down here," she informed Crowley, pronouncing Calloway's title as if she were speaking of some vile and obscene parasite, which was fair enough. "We won't pollute your cabin with his blood, never fear. Shall we wait on your attendance?"

If Crowley were a proper sailor, he'd probably want to wreak personal vengeance on the man who had presumed to usurp command of his ship. (If he were the kind of demon his lower-downs thought he was, he probably wouldn't let anyone else even _think_ about laying a finger upon someone who had so trespassed against him, who had harmed and humiliated him, who had almost certainly perpetrated unspeakable crimes against his person and his pride before dumping him in the bowels of his own vessel to die in darkness.) As it was, Crowley just wanted to never see him again, at least until nothing remained of him but an empty shell. 

"I'm sure you all can manage him on your own," he told Theek. "Just need some help up the ladder." At least this time he wouldn't be appropriating necessary manpower for his own convenience, when it was only the one man they had to kill instead of more than half the British crew.

Abe Seagram — who Crowley had in fact promoted from able seaman to bosun's second mate two years in, on merit of the skill and experience as a sailor by which he was exceedingly qualified to help direct a crew of several hundred, and to whom therefore the moniker Able Seagram technically no longer applied but which would follow him to his grave regardless — clasped Crowley's hand to pull him up by his good arm as Rowboat supported him from below. By the time Crowley set blood-red foot upon the weather deck, James Moore and Adolf "Dolphin" Ingesson were in the process of slinging the exsanguinated and (as Crowley could easily see in the stygian darkness — stygian, for it was the hour between, the dead hour, when all was silent and the starlight glinted off the black waves like wayward souls) emasculated body of Lieutenant Calloway over the side. He wondered, though not quite strongly enough to pry, what they'd done with the lieutenant's love-tackle.

Crowley slipped out of Able's grasp and swayed toward his cabin before anyone could stop him. As his foot crossed the threshold, he halted, grabbing quickly for the jamb to keep from overbalancing. His quarters had been tossed — put neatly back in order afterward, Calloway was a shining example of Naval discipline, no question of that; but things had been moved about, reorganised or even disposed of, and Crowley could sense the man's fingerprints on every inch of the space. With effort, he closed his lips on the hiss trying to escape through his teeth and wrenched his hand free of the doorpost without tearing a chunk out of the wood. The door slammed shut behind him.

Crowley set his palms on the desk and just leaned on them for a little while until he'd mostly stopped shaking. Then he ran a hand through the rat's-nest of his hair, banishing the filth and tangles so that it hung in loose, clean waves around his shoulders. Probably cut it too short to pull once he got back to England; for now, he found a scrap of black ribbon among the lieutenant's effects and tied it back out of his face, then untied it again and plaited it so tightly no strand could come free without his say-so. Out of human sight, the bloodstains smeared across his face and limbs flaked away into nothingness as he tentatively remoulded the tissue of his body — and _that_ was a right bugger of a task in itself, even without taking into account the confused signals his cells sent as they shifted: not entirely unlike trying to touch up the Mona Lisa while out of practice and heavily drunk, as opposed to simply dashing a frantic swathe of paint across the canvas to obliterate an inconveniently-placed organ or two, or convincing a material form to remember an earlier state of being and do everything that'd happened since that point over again backwards — until the worst of his wounds were sealed, leaving behind only untouched flesh and the superficial constellation of scabs and bruises that marked where they'd been. The gore-streaked spectacle of his back he left alone for the time being; it was enough to be rid of the pain without raising more questions.

With a snap, a new pair of sunglasses sat upon his nose. It only took a moment's rummaging to determine that the bottle he usually stowed in the space where most would keep a change of clothes had been moved to the bottom drawer of the desk, beneath his charts and stationery, because even bootlicking rapists could have their selfish little vices. Crowley pulled the cork with a gesture and drank straight from the bottle until the only thing he could taste was the sugarcane burn of alcohol. No watered-down grog, this; Crowley felt quite a bit dizzier when he set the bottle down. Maybe he should have asked Asif if it was a bad idea to imbibe with a concussion? That might be weird, though.

No sign of his weapons. It had been a slim hope anyway — no doubt Lobcock himself would have taken possession of them as his rightful prize. No sign of his boots, either. Crowley contemplated whether he really wanted to know what had been done with them, and decided probably not.

It wasn't like he couldn't make new ones as soon as he was feeling better, after all.

"Right," Crowley said as he stepped out of the cabin, scanning the night horizon until he sensed the _Cygnus_ several hundred yards to the north-northeast, the convoy having drifted apart over the last several hours. "Fighters and Row to the boats. Who's the ranking seaman on this wreck at the moment?"

"Myself, Captain," said Able as Row situated himself unbidden at Crowley's side.

"Whalebone—?"[17] asked Crowley of his second mate, dreading the answer.

"Dead," said Theek. "And Khan's below, with a shattered thigh."

Crowley slid his fingers up under his glasses to press them against his closed eyes for a moment, feeling very tired. "Fine. All right. We've forty-three, you said?"

"And another thirteen noncombatants," Theek confirmed.

Barely enough to get the _Apophis_ back to port, much less defend her if the need arose, even if everyone ran double shifts. "Then I leave it to the lot of you whether we capture the _Cygnus_ or sink her."

"They couldn't take our ship from us before, and we're not fucking letting them now," growled Theek. There was a murmur of agreement from the surrounding crew.

"You're sure?" Crowley asked quietly. "The _Cygnus_ is in better shape, and she'll be easier to handle with our numbers."

"With respect, Captain," pronounced Esmée before anyone else could speak up, "Anyone who wishes to keep the _Cygnus_ can go down with her."

Beneath the moonlight, silence reigned.

Crowley cleared his throat. "Right, then. If you're all — yeah. Got it. Willow, you're with the _Apophis,"_ he told Willoughby, the ship's foremost gunner and trigonometrist. "When you see the signal, I want the _Cassiopeia'_ s mainmast taken out. Lup—" Wait. Shit. No. Who else was there? "Deuce, you're with us. We go in, we take what we're owed, and we leave a message. Davies, over here. Your choice whether we tie you up." At the boy's nonplussed expression, Crowley explained, "If this goes right, the only person who'll ever know you were involved will be your friend Jensen. If it doesn't, though…"

Davies swallowed again as he processed the implications; then he held his wrists out.

"Mr. Seagram, clap this little snitch in irons," Crowley ordered, feeling the playacting swagger returning to him. The foot or so of chain would at least grant the kid enough range of motion not to make him more of a burden than necessary. "Beatriz, you've got your bow—? Good. You'll be in the lead boat with Theek and us. The rest of you can figure out your places, I trust," he concluded with a satisfying hint of menace.

Within five minutes, every battle-worthy pirate not otherwise engaged was loaded into the ship's boats and rowing toward the _Cygnus_ as the _Apophis_ tacked back toward the _Cassiopeia,_ oars cutting through the water with nary a sound or a splash. At the centre of the leading vessel, Crowley leaned forward to lay his hand on Beatriz's shoulder and murmured, "As soon as you can see the bastards, fire at will. Topmen first, then pick off whoever seems most likely to raise the alarm." Above, as Crowley took his hand away, the silvern slice of moon shone down upon their quarry, illuminating it in frost-limned silhouette. Beatriz would see her targets easily, and would not miss.

At two hundred yards, she stood, recurve bow in hand as she sighted along the arrow's path, correcting so instinctively for the movement of the waves that Sagittarius could not have held steadier. The bow was almost four feet long, barely a foot shorter than herself, with a 75-pound draw to compensate for the limited draw length she could bring to bear, and Beatriz had made it herself over the course of nine months' trial and error, aided by the experienced input of the ship's carpenter on materials and stress tolerances and what vague details Crowley could recall of Ottoman cavalry archers. It was the pinnacle of her craft, which she had been practicing since she was old enough to roam along the tributaries of the Río Segovia — Crowley had found her on a street corner in Puerto Gracias a Diablo[18] with four hundred pounds of oilcloth-wrapped crocodile and another hundred or so of crocodilian skeleton laid out on a blanket in front of her, and offered her gold to prove she could double the haul; and then, when she did, had promised more without limit for as long as she sailed under the serpentine flag.

At a hundred and fifty yards, she loosed. The arrow arced high through the air in a clean and elegant curve, so much simpler a calculation than the intuitive sense she'd developed for the deceptive quality of light through water, and split the heart of the British watchman before he ever heard it coming. A few seconds later, the steersman fell in his wake; and then the _Cygnus_ lay bright and unguarded before them.

"Where are the rest, escondididos detrás del arras?" Beatriz muttered, scanning the deck with a third arrow tensely nocked.

"Perchance they dream,"[19] replied Crowley offhandedly, as an inkling of suspicion began to grow in his mind, "and their guilt plagues their sleep."

Nine-tenths of the boat's occupants turned to stare at him, only some in disbelief. Davies, in particular, seemed to be rapidly reassessing his understanding of the past several hours. (Row, dear thing, was so absorbed in the rocking pendulum rhythm of oars that he did not seem even to notice his captain's weight on his shoulders, much less anything that had been said.)

Beatriz tore her eyes away from him and back to their target first, never once relaxing until they hove alongside the _Cygnus_ 's hull. In quick succession, a flurry of ropes hooked onto the ship's rail, and then the boarders were swarming up and over the side, spreading out with weapons drawn as soon as they touched the deck. As before, Rowboat fashioned a quick harness for Crowley, sort of a half-bosun's chair that he could loop under his left leg and hold onto as someone hoisted him up and helped him the rest of the way onto the deck before sending it back down for their young prisoner. The prisoner in question did not quite manage to hide his vexation at being treated with such solicitude — like some incompetent landlubber or needy child he'd worked so hard to prove himself the better of! — no matter that the chain on his wrists was hardly conducive to his scaling anything like a monkey.

The pirates around them seemed unsettled by the stillness that met them. "Like a ghost ship," someone muttered as Row swung nimbly over the rail to land beside Crowley on catlike feet.

"Soon will be," Esmée replied with such hungry anticipation it was clearly audible even at a whisper.

A choked sound interrupted them as Dolphin dispatched a King's-jack he'd found huddled behind a coil of spare rope. "Asleep," he explained, and pulled the twitching body into view to show it wearing a blue coat.

A number of the pirates' eyes went to the tops as several others made haste to the quarterdeck, scanning for any more unexpected inhabitants, before Crowley halted them with a hiss of, "Soft." Once he'd gotten their attention, Crowley elaborated, "No one's raised the alarm yet, which means no one here will wake unless we wake them."

What was the exact wording he'd used, when he laid that curse upon all who'd stood back and laughed at his degradation? It was hard to remember clearly now. _Nightmares from which you'll be unable to wake yourselves,_ or something, hadn't it been?

And that, more than any lack of manpower, explained why both watch and helm of an immensely valuable frigate had been left in the charge of a single inexpert cabin-boy. Even after such an unbridled bacchanal, no Naval commander worth his stripes would simply release his crew from their due vigilance, especially not in such dangerous waters. Crowley imagined the first watch turning over the hourglass and heading below to wake their relief, only to discover with growing perturbation and then panic when all but one of their compatriots proved utterly unresponsive; their panic increasing as exhaustion closed its heavy jaws upon them, and their attempts to impress on the boy the importance of his duty without revealing anything amiss (perhaps hailing their flagship in the darkness, if it would not draw undue attention, to exchange whispered, frantic conference, determining at the last that their only course lay in red-blooded British stoicism to carry them through to dawn and the tenuous hope of rescue or relief); the reckless, desperate plan forming in the boy's mind as one by one his superiors disappeared below, until he could lash the tiller in place and rob them as they lay unsuspecting, for all intents and purposes dead to the world.

He glanced up at the stars over their heads. _Quarter to four,_ he thought with grim humour, _and all's well._

"In and out," Crowley reminded his crew. "Beatriz, you're to take point with young Davies—" for on a ship as small as this one, only they would be able to navigate belowdecks without either hunching over or banging their heads, and he did not want anyone in so vulnerable a position to be in any way hindered. "Keep a sharp lookout for our new friend. Davies — would Mr. Jensen yield, if we threatened you?"

Davies shook his head without hesitation, miserable as it obviously made him to do so. "We're all told to sacrifice our lives for king and country. It's death if you don't, anyhow."

"Then I want our two strongest right behind you. Isaac," who had been so lost in the grief of their surrender and the near-certain prospect of being denied execution to die a slow and silent death once more in chains that he hadn't even the presence of mind to struggle, and who could only benefit from the opportunity to inflict even a fraction of that terror on one of their captors, "and—" Reflexively, Crowley began to call on Ayo before recalling the gash across her sword arm, slicing the muscle nearly to the bone. He bit off an oath, trying to think. "Er…James Moore, you're looking remarkably hale for one of the hardest-headed sons-of-bitches ever spat up out of the surf."

"Knocked out cold ere we were even boarded," he replied, disgusted. "Not a scratch but for a prizewinning goose-egg."

Crowley's face did something awkward and winceish of its own accord. "Right, uh, strangely ironic, sorry about that. Think you'd be able to help Isaac here subdue one of the Crown's finest?"

"Asleep and unarmed? Easy as rockabye."

"Then you're up. I'm afraid," Crowley leaned down to murmur into Davies' ear, "that we're going to have to give your friend a bit of a scare. Just play along, and with luck he won't try anything _too_ stupid."

The look Davies gave him before Beatriz pulled the kid forward gently but firmly by the scruff indicated a growing suspicion that luck had little to do with the matter, and if it did, it was in other hands than God's.

"The marines usually sleep sternwards, near the officers and midshipmen," Crowley heard the boy whisper to Beatriz before preceding her down the ladder.

Crowley left Eel and two more of their most mobile up top to search out and pick off any other hidden crewmen who might prove problematic if inauspiciously awakened, then followed the rest of the pirates below. The unnatural stillness of the sleeping sailors in their hammocks, oblivious to their fellows bleeding and dying less than a foot away, was indeed hauntingly reminiscent of Briar Rose's castle: an entire populace bespelled, trapped in time like insects in amber, numb to the outside world. The horror of the scene was enough to shake even Crowley for a moment — if not for the presence of one decent human among his captors, what would have happened to his surviving crew, trapped in the cells of an unattended ship with neither food nor water, drifting on the open ocean until either they perished or the merchants on the _Cassiopeia_ succumbed to curiosity and found them defenseless? — before he managed to remind himself that they'd have been _fine,_ if he hadn't woken up on his own his body would have died soon enough, and then he'd have been able to possess one of his sleeping assailants and release his crew and everything would have worked out _fine—_

A row ahead and to the left, the man under Theek's hand and Ayo's blade jolted awake, scrabbling frantically at the arms holding him down as his lifeblood pulsed away.

It wasn't quite true that all demons had a good memory for faces. As previously established, most demons had little enough experience with Earth and the material realm that they couldn't even tell most human faces apart, except by the most basic characteristics of colour and shape, any more than the average human could recognise individual spiders after a long interval and one or two barely-comprehensible interactions. What demons had, instead, was a good memory for _eyes._ It didn't matter how they changed physically over time — whether age altered their shape, or pigmentation or lighting their colour; whether they became clouded by cataracts, or blinded by brightness or injury, or were even mangled beyond the point of recognition. What mattered was what they _showed._

Eyes were the hardest part of a corporeal body for any angel or demon to change. A being could figure out how to hide every other identifying feature, but if anything revealed the true self beneath the façade, it would be the place where the soul peeked through.

Crowley moved before he realised he was doing it, stopping beside Ayo without seeming to cross the intervening distance and snatching the dagger from her belt to carve four strokes into the man's forehead before either of them could blink: two intersecting curves and a circle within, which might represent a two-tailed fish but might also represent an eye, surmounted by a crown-like diacritic that could be most closely translated as "addressed to the attention of" — the personal sigil of Dagon.

_Fisher King of men,_ indeed.

Rowboat caught Crowley by the elbow as he swayed, and Crowley realised that the silent, efficient massacre in their near vicinity had come to a resounding halt as every eye near enough to notice the commotion turned magnetically to him. Somewhat self-consciously, he reversed the blade and handed it back to Ayo, then gestured for the rest of them to carry on with their work.

Gradually, the chestnut-brown eyes of the dying man below him dulled, dimmed, and went dark.

Crowley looked up just in time to see "King" Arthur Woodrow following his example and catch his hand before he completed the second curve. "Special case," he whispered in reply to King Arthur's startled expression, directing a warning glare at anyone else nearby who might be tempted to follow his example. Best not to draw too much notice — a single impulsive sacrifice might be taken for granted as the kind of bribe that greased the flaming wheels of Hell, but a sudden influx of murdered souls addressed directly to Dagon might prompt someone to look into _why,_ and then some infernal file-clerk would cross-reference how many times Crowley's description came up, and there'd be questions, and—

Best not.

Partly to distract himself, and partly for the burn of satisfaction it brought, Crowley looked into the dreams of the sleeping men around him. Lots of drowning, getting eaten alive by sharks, whipped until flesh was cleaved from bone, that sort of thing — the usual sailor's hazards. Lots of battle flashbacks. Quite a few creepy-crawlies. The human idea of Hell, now and again. Leprosy, in one case. His father, in Petty Officer Bowen's case. Pity that hadn't made more of an impression on his own choices.

Not only getting hung, in Matthew Jensen's case, but drawn and quartered as well, interspersed with flashes of horrific violence in well-worn sequence only livened up by the addition of being used as Crowley had been used, strangled and violated without end for the crime of forfeiting his humanity.

Crowley jerked himself forcibly back to reality, where the only sign of Jensen's torment was the rapid flickering of his eyes beneath his closed eyelids. Crowley's body was breathing hard again, as if to reassure itself that it could. 

(He clenched his fingers and stretched them open again, resisting the impulse to put a hand to his throat.)

A wan sliver of lantern-light fell upon Jensen's face as the leading quartet came to a stop on either side of his hammock. Beatriz took the lantern from Davies' hand and hooked it to a beam overhead; then, with a whisper of reassurance, she pulled the boy back out of accidental melee range, put a blade to his throat, and nodded to Isaac and James Moore.

Jensen awoke with a muffled scream as James Moore clamped a hand over his mouth and Isaac pulled a loop of rope tight around his wrists. There was a chaotic thrashing of limbs, during which Jensen managed to kick Isaac squarely in the jaw and drive his elbow into James Moore's stomach, nearly writhing free of their grip before his eyes landed on the white, tense face of their hostage and he froze for the bare fraction of a second necessary for Isaac to punch him in the groin and both men to tip him out of his hammock onto the deck with a heavy thump.

Jensen didn't stop struggling or trying to scream, even as James Moore used the half-minute of breathless retching that followed to gag him securely before he could muster so much as a choked whine, until he lay completely immobilised under the weight of both pirates, bound ankle-to-wrist, eyes wild as he watched the relentless murder of his fellow crewmen only a few feet away. There was a smear of blood streaking his face from chin to cheek, accentuating the aura of savage desperation that hummed through every taut line of his body; hissing a string of curses, James Moore struck his captive across the face with a freely-bleeding fist.

Crowley shifted so that the light glinted off the black lenses of his glasses, waiting until Jensen caught sight of him to let his lips part slowly in a shark's grin. The man stilled, silent and trembling, cheeks reflecting wetly in the lamplight as the pirates completed their brutal work.

Crowley moved closer until he could crouch down in front of him, still grinning. "Hullo, Jenny."

Jensen stiffened at the nickname, eyes burning with hatred.

Crowley's grin widened. "You're a very lucky man, you know. Young Davies here vouched for you as the only misbegotten lickspittle on this ship worth sparing. Now: I'm sure you've heard plenty of rumours about me. Any of them mention how I handle captives?"

Jensen took a shaky breath and visibly steeled himself before giving a single wary nod.

Ah, notoriety. "Any of them mention that I'm capable of mercy?"

His prisoner couldn't quite hide the way his eyes darted toward Davies, still held at knifepoint in Beatriz's grip, before he fixed them firmly back on Crowley, stoically unresponsive.

"Mnh, s'pose no-one would want anyone to be able to accuse them of cowardice, yeah. Here's the thing. I'm going to give you a choice, Matthew Jensen. You listening?"

Lacking any other real option, Jensen nodded again.

"You could accept this gift your friend has worked so hard to negotiate for you. We'll take you along back to the _Apophis_ when we sink this sorry brig. —Now, I don't think your superiors would look kindly on the sole survivor of a pirate attack. I think they'd start wondering what it was you did to garner mercy, and from there it's a direct route to a court-martial—" Crowley didn't miss the way Jensen stopped breathing entirely at that, though it must have occurred to him already — "so there won't be any going back to your old life, I'm afraid. But we'll let you go safely on your merry way, free to live the life you choose. If that involves a legitimate trade, I know some people who could help you with that, no strings attached, and I'd recommend taking that favour, Jensen, because young Davies could use someone to keep an eye out for him and you won't get far with no money and no references, I promise you that. Or," and here Crowley tipped his chin in a way that could indicate either Davies or himself, now entirely solemn, "if you want to live the way God made you, there's always room for people like us on the _Apophis."_

Jensen glared at him, but there was more despair than fury in his eyes, now, and tear tracks cut clean lines through the blood on his face.

"Or you could stay here, and go down with your honour." Crowley pulled himself to his feet with Rowboat's assistance. "I'll give you some time to think about what that means to you. Secure them both," he told his crew. "I don't want them getting in the way while we finish up our business here."

Isaac and James Moore hauled their prisoner bodily into a sitting position to begin tying him to the very support beam from which hung his hammock, only inches from the corpses of his fellows. Beatriz nudged Davies forward to sit down meekly beside him, knees pulled up against his chest. "He means it," Crowley heard the boy whisper, "I promise, he knows and none of them even tried to hurt me—"

"Our people topside found two more men asleep at their posts," Theek informed Crowley when he stepped away to receive her report. "Another lobster, so they let that one alone just in case, but I've told them he's safe to be rid of now. Deuce is below, setting a ten-minute fuse for when we leave. All that's left to deal with otherwise is Lobcock." Theek paused, a silent, steady figure in the dark. "Captain," she said, when he didn't respond; then, "James. If you want him…"

Crowley hesitated for longer than was probably proper, then let out a breath. "Yeah. I…yeah."

"Eat his goddamned heart, Captain," said Beatriz behind him in tones of raw, red-hot iron, as quiet under the surrounding sounds of waves and creaking wood as the forge-fire that tempered it. (Crowley did not jump, because a denizen of Hell who showed surprise, or fear, or any form of dismay other than incredulity or disdain either learned better very quickly or became the target of choice for any passing piss-artist looking for a reaction; and while Crowley had made something of a career out of spending as little time interacting with his fellow demons as possible, he prided himself on being a _very_ quick learner.)

_Is he not approved in the height a villain, that hath slandered, scorned, dishonoured my kin? O, that I were a man—!_

Crowley managed a tight nod, and headed for the ladder.

"Keep the door shut behind me," he commanded his small cohort when he reached the captain's cabin, before unlatching it and slipping soundlessly inside. Not: _don't watch._ Not: _don't eavesdrop._ Just—

He needed to do this himself, and to know exactly what he was doing as he did it, to be certain it would work.

Lobcock's quarters were spare, tightly packed for efficiency of space. A desk and chair, maps and books neatly sorted. A sea-chest. A narrow cot, with the man deep in the cursed slumber of the hypocritical righteous upon it.

With a click of fingers, hellfire flared, and Lobcock awoke.

"You know what this is, don't you?" Crowley said softly, near-whispering, letting his usual painstaking control lapse so the hiss flickered across his tongue on every unvoiced syllable. He felt strangely disconnected from his body, as if all the effort he'd put into trying to tear himself free of it had unmoored him somehow. "People call it being hag-ridden. One of those dreams that feels like being awake, but you can't move, and you can't breathe, and it feels like there's something in the room with you." Typically, when he did this, it would be as if Crowley's victim was asleep, able to move and speak but unconscious of anything but his voice. This time was the opposite. Crowley wanted Lobcock _aware._ "That's me, O Captain of the H.M.S. _Cygnus."_ Venomous irony dripped from the name. "The _so-called demon."_

Lobcock's eyes darted toward his, pale and panicked.

With a serpentine smoothness, Crowley slunk onto the cot atop him, still-bare legs quaking at the proximity, though no part of their bodies touched. The ball of hellfire hung in the air where he'd stood, greedily sucking the oxygen from the room. "Hell comes for its own," Crowley told him. "Assume this is your last chance to avoid going there, Roger Harwood Lobcock. I'm going to let you speak."

Lobcock gasped, gulping down increasingly futile breaths in the airless cabin. "Almighty and most merciful Father—"

"No," said Crowley flatly. "No perjury. Confession doesn't count without true penitence of the heart, surely you know that."

"Everything I've done," Lobcock forced out through gritted teeth, "I did as my duty to God and country—"

"That's enough." Crowley's hands found Lobcock's throat and squeezed, no other force behind it but muscle and sinew and mundane bone, until he felt cartilage crack and collapse beneath his thumbs, and still he constricted tighter. "I'm doing you a favour," Crowley said, still soft and even, though all of him was shaking now, beyond his ability to control. Five people. He'd killed only five people across six years, all in the heat of battle, because swordplay was serious business and they were quite frankly big enough pricks that he couldn't be arsed to spare the extra miracle amidst the chaos and complexity of keeping his own crew safe. "I'm doing only one thing to you that you did to me."

He didn't bother with a knife this time, didn't let go; just concentrated as Lobcock suffocated wetly beneath him, and drew a strand of hellfire through the ethereal space between to burn a simple sigil into the flesh over the man's heart: a diagonal line and a curve, terminated by a neat loop at both ends. _One for Azazel_ — an offering to Hell, weighted down with every sin ever committed in his name, fit only for consumption.

Even if Lobcock's soul remembered this as something real, he'd never be able to tell anyone.

Crowley snuffed the flame as soon as he was finished, dragging it back into himself before it could flare out of control. It burned beneath his skin, hot and hungry as withdrawal, but Crowley filled his lungs and closed his eyes and held very, very still until he felt the spirit under his hands drain away through the sigil like light into a black hole and the temptation subsided to something prowling, dissatisfied, but manageable.

(It didn't do to let hellfire too near an untethered human soul, not unless you were prepared to deal with the consequences. You never could be entirely sure which would consume the other, and either way you ended up with something far more powerful and far more dangerous than before. The first human soul to enter Gehenna had been a nasty surprise for everyone.)

Crowley didn't know how long he knelt over the captain's empty corpse before he managed to disengage his hands from its crushed throat. He couldn't seem to stop them from trembling.

Definitely something wrong with this body. The concussion, maybe. He might have to disconnect from it entirely before he could properly repair — no. Bad idea. The way he was reacting to this whole rotten business, Crowley wasn't certain he'd remember why he wanted to inhabit it again afterward.

(He really hadn't been sure, until that last moment, that he hadn't missed something, some ineffable purpose or worthless revelation that would free Lobcock from the reckoning he'd earned. Even knowing how fully, unshakeably convinced the captain was that he had nothing to repent for. Even hedging his bets with the invidious entropy of hellfire, with one final opportunity to reject salvation. Crowley wasn't sure what he would have done if the scales had fallen from Lobcock's eyes, if he'd confessed honestly to his sins, if he'd begged for Crowley's forgiveness. He wasn't quite sure which outcome he'd truly been hoping for.)

His sword belt and pistol were set neatly next to Lobcock's. The pistol wasn't of any particular sentimental value, but the sword was a flambard rapier he'd picked up in Padua around 1610: a bit too lengthy to be entirely practical in confined quarters, but Crowley was used to the near-weightless balance of it, and the undulating flame-shaped blade matched his aesthetic and unsettled his opponents. He buckled it at his left side to keep it out of the way for now, opposite his usual — not that it made much of a difference, given that it had taken him several centuries on Earth to notice the whole dominant-hand thing in the first place, but a demon did have a reputation to keep up, and the moment of dawning panic that appeared in a _destro_ 's eyes when they realised what kind of swordsman they were facing was a reliable source of amusement.[20]

Crowley should probably ransack Lobcock's quarters for valuables or something, but the smell of King James Testament was making him itchy. He left.

"It's done," he stated as Theek, Eel, and the rest of the topside crew drew hastily away from the door, trying to pretend they hadn't been hovering intently throughout, whether out of curiosity or a dead-set determination to break it down regardless of orders if necessary. "Take whatever you want to keep. I've our captives still to attend to."

As he descended belowdecks again — much more of this tromping about and Theek was going to finish killing him where the King's men had left off — a hushed argument near the officers' quarters caught Crowley's attention.

"Mira — (carajo) — deja el maldito, _leave_ it, Ranjit—"

"I am not letting that baptised son of a bitch keep any part of—"

"It will sink with him i alla fall! Vill du att Captain to find out—?"

The small huddle of pirates fell silent as Crowley stepped into the lamplight. He didn't even have to look at Ranjit's defiant expression, nor the way Dolphin and Itz moved in front of him as one, to sense the guilt rolling off them in waves, or the unanimous desire to hide—

Right. Stanton, marine sergeant, with the whole…hair thing. That had still been the first shift, hadn't it.

Any emotion Crowley could feel about his crew trying to protect him from something that had already happened was too enormous for him to safely handle right now, so he packed it away somewhere far in the back of the sordid, cluttered undercroft of his mind to address later — possibly after Armageddon — and turned instead to where Jensen and Davies sat.

"Hello again, gentlemen." Crowley smiled with nothing behind it as he began to untie the gag. "Had the chance to consider my offer?"

Jensen glared back with the bullheaded resolve of one for whom courage was all he had left. "For Davies' sake, I have. And I've had the chance to consider the worth of a pirate's promise, while all your — your _compatriots_ robbed the men they killed before they've even grown cold."

"Well, we're a bit too busy to wait, I'm afraid," Crowley replied pragmatically.

"I'm not a child to be threatened and manipulated," Jensen spat. "What assurance do I have that you'll do as you say?"

Crowley's smile grew colder yet. "The assurance of someone your _compatriots_ were equally happy to see dancing at the end of a rope."

Jensen's face reddened with anger and mortification. "I don't know what you think of me, but I am _nothing_ like y—"

"Molly," Crowley answered quietly.

Jensen went dead white.

"The men you fought side-by-side with would have murdered you by court-martial, Mr. Jensen, just because they could," said Crowley. "At least when we pirates kill someone, we have a reason. Now, are you going to give us that reason, or not?"

"For Davies' sake," Jensen repeated hollowly, after two failed attempts, "I'll go with you."

"There," Crowley grinned. "Wasn't that easy?" As he drew his dagger and leaned forward to cut the bonds around Jensen's ankles, Crowley murmured in his ear, "Give us any reason to regret sparing you and I'll start removing body parts, Mr. Jensen. First from you, and then from him. Understood?"

"Yes," Jensen whispered back bitterly.

"Good. Oh, and Jensen—" Crowley finished sawing through the rope securing both him and Davies to the support beam — "keep in mind that I could have made this _so_ much worse."

The impotent loathing on Jensen's face as Crowley drew back and rose to his feet with a dizzy sinuousness that could be mistaken for grace warmed the cracked blast-furnace of his heart, it really did.

"We're finished here," he told Theek once he'd found her again. "Get everyone back to the boats and that fuse lit in five minutes. I want our captives kept separate and Jensen with us, just for insurance. And for the Devil's sake," he added, glancing back at Jensen, who was doing his best to keep Davies behind him while surrounded by pirates on all sides, "have someone get the man some decent clothes, will you?"

* * *

**Footnotes:**

[17] When a man has been christened William Busk, certain nicknames cannot be fought so much as submitted to; the only question is whether it happens with grace or futility. [return to text]

[18] Cabo Gracias a Dios, located at the border of modern Honduras and Nicaragua, is said to have been dubbed Cape Thanks-to-God by Christopher Columbus in 1502 after he rounded it safely in the lee of a tremendous storm. The indigenous Miskito Kingdom occupying the area resisted repeated attempts at colonial invasion well into the 19th century, aided by the inhabitants' willingness to offer sanctuary to pirates and privateers that preyed on Spanish ships in the area. One of the most prominent of these sanctuaries lay several miles of swampland, rocky promontories, and carnivore-infested jungle north of the cape, and was colloquially referred to as Port Thanks-to-the-Devil due in part to the massive cannon batteries that guarded the cliffs overlooking the bay and the tendency of sudden storms to wreck ships that sailed too close to them. [return to text]

[19] Crowley had yet to reveal to Aziraphale that _Hamlet_ was, of all of Shakespeare's tragedies, the only one he'd memorised line-for-line. This was because doing so would require him to concede an incredibly minor two-hundred-year-old argument to the angel, who would then be unbearably gracious about how exquisitely smug he wasn't, for the rest of time. So far, Crowley had managed to pass off the occasions when he forgot himself and referenced the play in Aziraphale's presence as the result of his own gracious favour in making _Hamlet_ such a ubiquitous cultural touchstone that it could hardly be avoided. He'd only recited it for Beatriz because he'd already exhausted the rest of his Shakespearean repertoire, anyway. [return to text]

[20] The reader should not be tempted to assume any connection with Saint Anthony of Padua (1195–1231 A.D.), or at least any relevant one. Like many other rich and ambitious would-be rakes, rogues, and picaresques across Europe, Crowley had studied under the master fencer Salvator Fabris following the publication of his wildly popular instruction manual in 1606, during the author's stint teaching at the University of Padua. Signor Fabris despaired both of his pupil's reckless disregard for life and limb and his persistent focus on flashy stage-fighting tactics over proper technique, but could not deny his inexplicable competence in an actual match. When the distinction needed to be made — which it seldom was, given that the taboo against fencing with one's left hand was so pervasive that most never even contemplated the thought — the term _destro_ was used to describe a right-handed swordsman, whereas a left-handed one would be referred to as a _mancino._ [return to text]

**Author's Note:**

>  **Additional warnings:**  
>  • racial, gendered, and queerphobic slurs (including terms previously in common use which are now considered slurs)  
> • multiple instances of and references to choking, strangulation, and asphyxiation  
> • impending threat of execution by hanging, accompanied by entity-typical disregard for physical mortality  
> • corrective rape and misgendering of a trans/nonbinary/intersex character  
> • brief suicidal ideation and references to suicide  
> • brief but graphic references to genital injury  
> • references to victim-blaming and brainwashing  
> • sexual coercion of a closeted gay character, accompanied by references to period-typical homophobic violence  
> • mob violence  
> • brief references to pederasty and underage sex  
> • brief potential emetophobia triggers  
> • minor period-typical ableism  
> • references to addiction  
> • references to child abuse.
> 
> For those who would like a more specific idea of what to expect when, **warnings for each chapter are listed[here](https://cineresis.tumblr.com/private/621672612824760320/tumblr_6htcR5WWktMeqzxMd).** If you have any questions about the content warnings for this fic, let me know in the comments and I'll try to reply as promptly as possible, and may update the author's notes if appropriate.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Originally written for [a much simpler kink meme prompt](https://good-omens-kink.dreamwidth.org/3161.html?thread=1922649#cmt1922649) than this fic turned out to be.
> 
> My writing playlist for this fic can be found [here](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhbTl4Cj9ZARVXr_sMcvjkXubQT0k4yRh). You may recognise certain chapter titles.
> 
> The title of the fic itself is taken from a line spoken by Macbeth in Act 2, scene 2 of the Scottish play:
> 
> _Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood  
>  Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather  
> The multitudinous seas incarnadine,  
> Making the green one red._
> 
> Other works referenced within this fic include Shakespeare's _Hamlet_ and _Much Ado About Nothing,_ as well as _Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God_ by Rev. Jonathan Edwards and _Paradise Lost_ by John Milton.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Reader feedback gives me the life and motivation needed to keep writing. If you liked this, please consider leaving a comment, checking out my [other work](https://cineresis.tumblr.com/tagged/i-did-this) or [meta](https://metatextuality.tumblr.com/tagged/for-%248000-a-month-i-will-stop) on Tumblr, or reading [my current work in progress](https://good-omens-kink.dreamwidth.org/616.html?thread=1707368#cmt1707368) regarding the cycle of Heavenly abuse and the breaking thereof. My health and verbal processing have been severely limited this year, so I may not always be able to respond, but rest assured that I read and adore every comment, from inarticulate screaming to lengthy essays and everything in between. <3
> 
> As with everything I create, podfics and other properly-credited transformative works are always welcome! All I ask is that you share them with me so I can enjoy the results.
> 
> I am inexpressibly honoured by the incredible works this fic has managed to inspire thus far:  
> • Art by [May Sparrow](https://queenburd.tumblr.com) of Crowley in happier moments — including moments where he has come to Make Friends And Incite Mutiny: [[1]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/647663510607888384/670141901885931533/image0.jpg) [[2]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/647663510607888384/723022978455175259/image0.jpg) [[3]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/647663826300436481/751682175891537990/image0.jpg)  
> • A [book cover](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/647663510607888384/708603222004072468/The_Seas_Incarnadine.png) in the style of the Penguin Classics series by [Meridians_of_Madness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Meridians_of_Madness)  
> • A [moodboard](https://weird-mcgee.tumblr.com/post/623755519904120832/%F0%9D%95%8B%F0%9D%95%99%F0%9D%95%96-%F0%9D%95%8A%F0%9D%95%96%F0%9D%95%92%F0%9D%95%A4-%F0%9D%95%80%F0%9D%95%9F%F0%9D%95%94%F0%9D%95%92%F0%9D%95%A3%F0%9D%95%9F%F0%9D%95%92%F0%9D%95%95%F0%9D%95%9A%F0%9D%95%9F%F0%9D%95%96-by-cineresis-this-whole) by [weird-mcgee](https://weird-mcgee.tumblr.com/)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Multitudinous](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24871558) by [childrenofthesun](https://archiveofourown.org/users/childrenofthesun/pseuds/childrenofthesun)
  * [The Souldiers Pocket Bible](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25777705) by [unsmilingchuck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unsmilingchuck/pseuds/unsmilingchuck)




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